Evolution of French Corporate Ownership: 1977-2017

Tristan AUVRAY * Maître de conférences, USPC, Université Paris 13, CEPN-CNRS.Contact : tristan.auvray@univ-paris13.fr. L'auteur remercie les coordinateurs de ce numéro ainsi que les rapporteurs dont les remarques ont contribué à améliorer cet article. Il reste néanmoins seul responsable des erreurs et omissions de ce texte.

This article presents the evolution of shareholdings in French listed and non-listed corporations since 1977, with a focus on the beginning of the 21st century, twenty years after the unlocking of the French financial core. We present an original method that combines national balance sheets and FDI statistics published by the Banque de France, and the CPIS coordinated by the IMF in order to give an order of magnitude of the localisation of French corporate owners. We present also numbers on the evolution of ownership of French CAC 40 corporations since 2002. Despite the rise of institutional investors since the late nineties, levels of ownership concentration are very stable. Nevertheless, new activist shareholders (sovereign wealth funds, hedge or private equity funds) are among the first shareholders. Moreover, the stability of the concentration of the five first shareholders, coupled with a decline of the share of the first shareholder, gives more weight to the main blockholders.