The city of Lyon has recently hosted the 2025 Global Industrie event, welcoming exhibitors and visitors from across the world with more than 84 countries represented. The event was an opportunity for international delegations, innovative start-ups and major foreign companies to discuss global opportunities and exchange with top French industrial players, facilitating the creation of international partnerships and strategic collaborations.

Despite geopolitical and economic uncertainties, data show that industrial players continue to invest to develop internationally, with both French companies eager to export and foreign firms eyeing France as an attractive destination to expand.

In the past five years, 31% of the country’s SMEs have exported abroad — with 17% of them reporting regular exports, according to Bpifrance’s 2025 report on SMEs and export. Industrial SMEs in particular are more internationally oriented, with 53% of them having exported over the last five years.

About 36% of the French workforce located abroad is from the industrial sector, data from INSEE show. On the other hand, France’s national statistics bureau reports that in 2022, the country counted about 18,800 foreign-owned companies, employing 2.3 million people — one-third (762,000) in the industrial sector — with the number of companies increasing progressively since 2018.

Sakowin: a French deeptech player testing its product abroad

An innovative firm looking to develop internationally is French green deeptech company Sakowin. Founded in 2017 in Aix-en-Provence, Sakowin has created and patented a technology to produce decarbonized hydrogen through methane plasmalysis, via a compact, modular and stackable reactor. The CO₂-free process can be integrated into existing industrial and gas infrastructures for on-site and on-demand hydrogen production at a competitive cost.

The company, which is supported by the EIC Accelerator and Bpifrance’s DeepTech label, launched an industrial pilot program in 2024 to test and optimize its reactors in collaboration with industrial partners. The first pilot is expected to start in the next few months in Switzerland, where 11 industrial players have come together to form a cluster as part of efforts to find decarbonization solutions. One will test Sakowin’s technology to produce hydrogen from natural gas but all will benefit from the results.

For the company, it made sense as soon as the pilot phase to go beyond France’s borders. “Decarbonization is a global topic and industries that use natural gas are everywhere around the world,” says Pierre-Arnaud Sarda, CSO of Sakowin, which has signed a second pilot project in Spain and is currently in negotiations for others in France, the U.S., Portugal, Germany and Belgium.

Though it receives a lot of calls each week from interested players from around the globe, the firm focuses for now on certain areas: Europe and North America.

“We’re still a small team of about 30 people so it’s important for us not to get scattered,” says Sarda.

In the future, not only the U.S. but also Asia, and in particular India, as well as Africa and the Middle East will be interesting markets for Sakowin once it has sufficient production capacity for its modules. To this end, the deeptech company is currently raising 25 million euros for commercial launch and the building of a first plant, with the aim of significantly increasing production capacity by 2027-2028. It may also turn to other companies from around the world for strategic partnerships to continue its expansion. “For the U.S., the question will be: at what point will we launch a plant there?,” asks Sarda.

CarbiCrete: building a partnership with Saint-Gobain

One foreign company that’s found an opportunity to enter the French market is CarbiCrete. Founded in 2016, the Montreal-based firm has developed a patented technology that enables the production of cement-free concrete. Its innovative process helps eliminate 100% of cement-related emissions and removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, by replacing cement with a steel-making by-product (called steel slag or “slag”) and mineralizing CO2 into the concrete for permanent storage. The decarbonization solution can be used to produce blocks that are used for constructing buildings and hardscape products (paving stones, retaining wall elements, interlocking pavers, etc.).

CarbiCrete licenses its technology to customers and “works with them to design and develop the chambers that they need and the process conditions for their equipment,” explains CEO Jacob Homiller. One such customer is the global French material company Saint-Gobain, which invested in the Canadian company in 2022 as part of its efforts to achieve net zero carbon by 2050. The two firms have worked closely together via Saint-Gobain’s subsidiary POINT.P to implement CarbiCrete’s technology at one of the French company’s 16 concrete manufacturing plants in France, with the goal of deploying it to the other facilities in the future.

“We’re very excited about this opportunity, especially as a still small company in Canada, to partner with a global player and to seize this chance to expand our business in Europe, where we also have a couple of similar projects with other companies,” says Homiller.

The two companies could explore other ways to collaborate in the future such as the building of a greenfield plant that would reuse industrial flue gas and its CO2 in the curing process of CarbiCrete’s technology. “The environment in France is very supportive of products and technology like ours that can help improve climate conditions,” Homiller explains. “And in Europe in general there’s more of a push to create incentives to reduce the carbon footprint of the building sector.”

The CEO explains that as pressure and regulation increases on the sector, their technology will become more and more competitive. “Being successful with Saint-Gobain is a good proof point for us and a pathway for other opportunities.”