THE DEFINITIVE EMANCIPATION OF A GLOBAL PLAYER
The summary of Sanofi’s trajectory over 2024–2026 highlights a fundamental, and now irreversible, divergence between the mission of a national champion entrusted with a public health role and the reality of a global financial corporation structured to extract maximum value.
The Group’s institutional communications, amplified at the “Choose France” summits by promises of millions of euros in local investment, function as a political defusing mechanism. Behind the language of “health sovereignty” and “independence,” management orchestrated a complete shift in its centres of gravity. On the industrial front, the high-profile sale of Opella to CD&R illustrates the strategic lack of interest in producing everyday essential medicines, making the national supply of paracetamol subordinate to profitability imperatives dictated by a U.S. investment fund. On the scientific front, the ongoing haemorrhage of jobs in French laboratories—marked by hundreds of job cuts and the closure of historic sites—confirms that Sanofi has abandoned internal innovation. The model now rests on paying top dollar to acquire foreign biotechs (Blueprint, Vigil), turning what was once the pride of French research into a vast global financing and commercialisation structure.
The firm’s power architecture is the corollary of this transformation. With 65.5% of its capital held by foreign institutional investors (including 38% in the United States) and a Board of Directors in which French nationality is relative, Sanofi is structurally aligned with the Anglo-Saxon financial doctrine. The distribution of €10 billion in dividends and share buybacks in 2025—an amount greater than global R&D spending—demonstrates that shareholder returns are the absolute priority in the Group’s decisions.
Finally, the humiliating agreement signed with the Donald Trump administration in December 2025, slashing U.S. prices and sacrificing European solidarity in exchange for a tariff exemption and promises of massive investment in the United States, completes this demonstration.
It confirms that Sanofi is no longer a French or European geopolitical instrument, but a transnational economic actor whose strategic matrix is determined by its access to the North American market.
For the French public authorities, the persistence of this cognitive dissonance calls for an urgent doctrinal revision. The illusion of control through minority state shareholdings, or the granting of subsidies in exchange for employment promises, cannot offset a corporate strategy whose capital foundations require local deindustrialisation. France’s and Europe’s health sovereignty will require the emergence of, and unconditional support for, a new industrial network made up of locally committed actors and public infrastructure—formally acknowledging that Sanofi has, de facto, ceased to be the armed wing of national health sovereignty.
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