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Good morning business, the big interview. We are with Patrice Caine, the CEO of Thales, who has just received the Manager of the Year award. Good evening, Patrice Caine. Congratulations on this award. The Manager award obviously speaks to you as a team leader. You received it from Xavier Hillard, with whom you wrote an op-ed on mathematics. This is something you care about: that we can have fun with mathematics and progress in this discipline. How can we make it sexy?
Ah, mathematics is very fun. You can do many things with math. The real goal for our kids is to show that it's concrete and applied, that you can do things, not just pure abstraction.
In your group, you have 83,000 employees, which is enormous. You have a lot of talent in aviation, cybersecurity, engineering, and a very important R&D center. Are you specifically looking for profiles whose brains work well with mathematics?
So, we hire many engineers, that's true, engineers who can do many things, not just math of course. 33,000 people in R&D at Thales, out of the 83,000 you mentioned. That represents about 4 billion euros of R&D each year. That's more than the CNRS budget.
Ah yes, the BFM Awards this year are under the sign of Europe, the European awakening. Here we heard many bosses believe in it, but also criticize the slowness, lack of awareness, and competitiveness. Do you think we will succeed?
I am optimistic by nature but realistic. We must succeed. It's not 'will we succeed', it's 'we must succeed'. Moreover, our continent deserves it. We have many assets. Now we just need to put them in positive phase resonance. That's physics, not math. To ensure that our continent and our country, France, remain at the best global level.
But how do we do it? How do we stay at the best global level with all the constraints we have, whether regulatory or self-imposed? That's often the criticism from entrepreneurs.
I strongly advocate for supporting research and innovation. There are other levers, but research and innovation—our economics Nobel showed it—is differentiation through innovation. That's what can allow our continent to hold its rank. Academic research is formidable. Now, how to keep it competitive? The research tax credit is an absolutely existential tool for our companies to stay in the leading pack.
But for a group like yours, what does R&D represent? How big is it?
Well, it's 33,000 people, as I said. So it's probably the company with the highest R&D intensity. When I convert that into euros, it's more than the CNRS budget. So these are considerable sums. But if we touch the research tax credit, it means fewer people. That is, your R&D budget changes immediately. Not immediately, but it means our R&D in France will become much less competitive than in other countries. In France, we are at about 100 on a base of 100; the European average is 70. We are 30% more expensive than the European average in R&D. The research tax credit allows us to return to that European average. It doesn't mean doing better, just returning to that average. We need to stay there if we want to remain competitive compared to other research centers we have in other European countries. And I'm not even talking about Asia, where the benchmarks are still very different.
There are questions of regulation, speed, and also money. We had the ministerial of defense which gives investments for the next three years: 22 billion euros. That's good news.
Listen, let's stay positive. Yes, these are significant investments. Of course, we would always like more, but I think with this amount, Europe will be able to stay at a very good level. The other thing is the multiannual budget of the European Union, which will complement that. And there we are talking about 40, 50, 60 billion euros invested in space. That puts us at the same level as the Americans with that type of budget. Ah, we are there. So, without complexes, we are at the best global level in space and we compare to Americans, Chinese, or others. The objective for Europe is to stay in the big leagues. And for that, it requires investing significant sums.
