A few days ago, I ran into a fellow student from my engineering school… Thirty years without seeing each other. He is today general manager of a European subsidiary of a Chinese group. We spoke for a few minutes after getting off a train. He told me, with a frankness that I appreciated: “Europe requires us to produce locally. What a mistake. In the end, it is the consumer who pays. » I didn’t have time to tell him what I really wanted to say. So I write it here.
A few weeks ago, a French industrialist told me about a call for tenders that he had just lost with a large pharmaceutical group. Its price: 6 million euros. The selected Chinese competitor: 2.5 million. The pharmaceutical group, with several billion turnover, chose the cheapest. Which may seem perfectly rational.
The price displayed is not the final price
Except that the French industrialist did not understand. Because the raw material alone – the stainless steel, the pumps, the basic equipment – already costs more than 2.5 million. How can a competitor quote a price lower than the cost of materials? Is there any state funding behind it? Export assistance? And if so, for what purpose, and at whose expense?
We are told that competition from low-cost countries is good news for the French consumer. May prices fall, purchasing power increases. This is true in the very short term, and in a single dashboard.
But this table only shows one column. The price displayed is not the final price. Maintaining industrial equipment remotely, without a contact who speaks French, without a technician who can be on site in forty-eight hours, it costs. Extended delivery times, three weeks of downtime for a valve that cannot be found, guarantees that are worthless once the dispute is ten thousand kilometers away… all of that costs.
The pharmaceutical group which chose 2.5 million will perhaps end up paying more than 6 million. But this line does not appear in the initial purchasing decision.
An unemployed employee has no purchasing power
It also does not show what disappears when the French industrialist does not win this contract. It’s not just a lost file. It’s a design office that works less. Regional subcontractors who see their books empty. Young engineers that we don’t hire. A company that stops investing, then ceases to exist. And without industry, no regional bank, no services, no local commerce, no confidence in the country. Deindustrialization cannot be seen in a call for tenders. She sees herself ten years later in territories which no longer have anything to offer their inhabitants.
Christian social thought speaks of the universal destination of goods: this conviction that the wealth produced must benefit everyone, not just those who have the means to capture it. There is something ironic about defending consumer purchasing power by destroying that same consumer’s jobs. An unemployed employee has no purchasing power. A region without industry has no economy. And an economy without industry has no foundation.
So, what would you have done in the place of the pharmaceutical group? The price gap is real, massive, and the Chinese supplier is a world leader. I don’t blame the person who signed. I’m just asking the question that no one asks in the decision-making room: what is the real cost of this choice, and who will pay it?
To my classmate, this is what I would have liked to say: if we want consumers to be able to buy, they must first have a job to do so. Industry is not a cost to be optimized. This is the condition of the entire rest of the economy.
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