Airbus, Sanofi planning a $10bn French toast to India

France is looking at making some big-ticket investments in India that may be worth upwards of $10 billion. Leading aircraft firm Airbus and pharmaceutical major Sanofi, both headquartered in that country, are working on plans to set up manufacturing units here.

Updated on: Jun 30, 2014, 24:07:40 IST

Hindustan Times | By Shishir Gupta, New Delhi

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France is looking at making some big-ticket investments in India that may be worth upwards of $10 billion. Leading aircraft firm Airbus and pharmaceutical major Sanofi, both headquartered in that country, are working on plans to set up manufacturing units here.

French foreign minister Laurent Fabius, who arrives in India on Monday, will seek Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s assurance on issues of taxation, land acquisition and availability of technical manpower while also pushing for military hardware sales to India when they meet Tuesday. Before that, Fabius is set to meet foreign minister Sushma Swaraj and finance minister Arun Jaitley.

According to South Block officials, Airbus is looking to invest anywhere between $10 billion and $15 billion in aircraft manufacturing as part of its Asia expansion plan and is expected to make a written offer to the Modi government in the coming days.

“Sanofi, which is into high-end pharma, is looking to invest $200-300 million in India if the government is able to give single window clearances and clarify on taxation issues,” said a senior official.

While Paris is keen on cementing economic ties with the BJP-led government, it has already made deep inroads into the Indian nuclear and space sector. The indigenous PSLV rocket is scheduled to launch a French satellite into space from the Sriharikota spaceport in Tamil Nadu on Monday — in the presence of PM Modi.

The two countries are also converging majorly in the defence and security sector. During his talks with Jaitley, Fabius is expected to bring up a proposed deal to co-develop a ship-based short-range surface-to-air missile worth $1.8 billion.

They would also discuss ongoing projects such as the upgradation of 50 Mirage-2000 fighters (at a cost of $2 billion), a project for six submarines at Mazagoan dockyards and the recently negotiated deal for 126 medium multi-role combat aircraft.

Like Israel, a major arms supplier to India, France has refrained from supplying weapons to Pakistan.

France is also ready to offer technology to intercept voice over internet protocol telephony to help the Indian counter-terrorism machinery.

With Europe slowing down economically and French companies under threat of acquisition from China and America, the Francios Hollande government in Paris is looking towards India both as a strategic ally and a market in Asia.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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