It’s never too late to admit your mistakes. The Minister of the Economy, Antoine Armand, is going to Calais this Tuesday, November 5, to sign the contract for the acquisition of 80% of the capital of Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) from Nokia. Times are changing. This specialist in the installation and maintenance of submarine cables, through which part of our data passes between continents, is now considered a strategic asset by the state shareholder.
“Mastering this technology and the infrastructures that depend on it is an issue of sovereignty and technological independence,” Bercy says today. This operation carried out by the State Participation Agency appears judicious at a time when the appetite for data within the global Internet continues to grow, thanks in particular to the explosion in the use of artificial intelligence.
The vanished dream of a “telecoms Airbus”
But this awareness comes almost ten years late. In 2016, the Finnish telecoms giant got its hands on Alcatel-Lucent for 15.6 billion euros with the blessing of a certain… Emmanuel Macron, then Minister of the Economy. The tenant of Bercy at the time had no problem describing this operation as a “reconciliation”, or even a “merger”. A year later, the name of the French multinational disappeared in favor of Nokia Networks, letting the sweet dream of an “Airbus of telecommunications” disappear.
In the rearview mirror, this transaction appears to be a bitter failure for French technological and economic sovereignty. Since then, the subject has gained ground under the cumulative effect of the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. In the meantime, the head of state has considerably changed his software in this area. At the cost of a few broken pots.