Baccalauréat Section Européenne, session juin 2001
Discipline Non linguistique: Sciences Economiques et Sociales
Preparation : 20 minutes
Oral exam : 20 minutes, 10 minutes to answer the question, and 10 minutes for discussion.Using the document and your knowledge, make a structured answer of the following question.Subject n°3 :
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On May 18th, it emerged that Alcatel, a big French telecoms-equipment group, had reopened multi-billion dollar merger talks with Lucent, a struggling American rival. Three days later, Vivendi Universal, a media group based in France, announced that it had offered to buy MP3.com, an American online music-sharing company; and on the following day, Vivendi did not deny that it was in the early stages of negotiating to buy Houghton Mifflin, an American publisher that could be worth around $1.7 billion. Such a flurry of Franco-American deals is unprecedented in recent years.
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Levels of foreign direct investment (FDI) into France have never been higher. Last year, for example, France recorded 563 inward investment deals, up from 447 in 1999. America accounted for 178 of them, with Germany the second-biggest investor with 102. More than 35,000 new jobs will be created over the next three years by such investments.Longer-term figures from the OECD tell a similar story. In the late 1980s, France invested nearly twice as much overseas as it received from abroad. Until 1998, the gap remained much the same. Although the trend appeared to go into reverse in 1999 and last year, this can be explained largely by the effect of a few huge deals, notably Vivendi's $34 billion acquisition last June of Seagram's Universal business.
This is consistent with other measures. Research by J.P. Morgan on global mergers and acquisitions suggests that activity by French companies is in line with the size and influence of the French economy. European companies in general have been big buyers of their North American counterparts, snapping up $1.16 trillion-worth of assets there since 1988. Britain has been by far the biggest acquirer, with $504 billion-worth. France's $186 billion places it a distant second.May 24th 2001 from The Economist