A little known fact: there is a higher level of foreign ownership of top French companies than of either US or UK large companies.
The French state still owns €170bn in assets of traded French companies; it has also proved unwilling to relinquish ownership in some industries and keen to protect French ownership of others. However, according to the publicly available listings from Thomson Financial, at least 25.1% of CAC 40 assets are owned by foreign companies and investors. This compares with only 6.9% of the top 40 companies by market capitalisation in the S&P 500 and 22.2% of the top 40 companies in the FTSE 100, touted as two of the most international markets in the world.
