France Stacks €18.8 Billion in Portuguese FDI and 130,000 Jobs Across 1,700 Subsidiaries — Gulbenkian's 9th Franco-Portuguese Economic Conference Counts Stellantis, Natixis, Vinci and Airbus as Sector Anchors

France held the title of Portugal's second-largest foreign direct investor at the close of 2024, with a stock of €18.8 billion in direct investment, 1,700 French-owned subsidiaries on the ground and roughly 130,000 jobs supported across the corporate footprint. The numbers were laid out on 19 June 2026 at the 9th Franco-Portuguese Economic Conference, held at the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation) in Lisbon, anchored on the new study For a More Competitive Europe — the Franco-Portuguese Partnership Contribution.

The trade leg of the relationship is tighter than the headline FDI number suggests. France absorbs about 12% of Portuguese goods exports and ranks as the third-largest export destination and the third-largest commercial supplier for the country. The 2024 export bill to France came in at €16.3 billion. Portuguese FDI in France runs the other way at €3.2 billion of stock, with Tekever (drones), EDP (renewables) and Powerdot (electric-vehicle charging) the most visible names expanding in the French market.

Sector composition explains why the Franco-Portuguese book is harder to dislodge than most bilateral relationships. Automotive runs through Stellantis at Mangualde, Horse (the Renault-Geely powertrain joint venture) at Cacia, and dozens of Tier-1 and Tier-2 component plants that have anchored Portugal as a continental injection-moulding and wiring-harness base. Finance carries Natixis (with more than 3,000 employees at its Porto centre), BNP Paribas and Euronext, the Paris-headquartered exchange that operates the Bolsa de Lisboa (Lisbon Stock Exchange). Infrastructure runs through Vinci, the Paris-listed group whose ANA Aeroportos de Portugal concession covers the country's ten national airports. Aerospace runs through Airbus, with components and machined parts feeding into a target that has Portugal carrying close to a quarter of global Airbus production by some 2026 measures. Retail and food round the picture out, with Decathlon, Auchan, Intermarché, Leroy Merlin and Lactalis (about 800 employees) all on the ground.

Pierre Debourdeau, a partner at Eurogroup Consulting and one of the study's editors, framed the relationship in his Gulbenkian intervention as one of "rare attributes — political trust, human density, corporate presence, economic complementarity". The human-density argument matters because the Portuguese diaspora in France remains the single largest expatriate community of any European Union member state on French soil, and provides the natural recruitment pool for the French-owned operations in Portugal that need bilingual operators, engineers and finance staff.

The competitive read going into 2027 is where the conference spent the most time. The shared theme — that Europe is losing ground to the United States on capital cost and to China on industrial cost — pushes the Franco-Portuguese book toward sectors where Portugal's cost-of-labour gap to France and Spain still matters, where French capital cost is still cheaper than capital sourced inside Portugal, and where Brussels-anchored sovereignty themes (defence, semiconductors, critical raw materials, green energy) lift both governments into a buyer-of-first-resort posture. Expect the next iteration of the AICEP (Agência para o Investimento e Comércio Externo de Portugal — Portuguese Trade and Investment Agency) FDI book to lean harder into renewable hydrogen, lithium processing and dual-use defence — three buckets where French champions already have a Portuguese platform and where the Trabalho XXI labour package, if it passes Saturday's floor vote, narrows one of the lingering complaints French chief executives have made about scale-up costs in Portugal since the 2017 reform package was diluted.