Top 10 Biggest Tech Companies in France by Market Cap

The biggest tech companies in France by market cap are not the ones most people name. Ask a room of investors to list French technology champions and you will hear Dassault Systèmes, Capgemini, maybe Atos. All three are real answers. None of them is close to the top.

The actual number one — Schneider Electric, at roughly €155.6 billion — is filed by index providers under Industrials, sells switchgear and busways, and was founded in 1836. It is also, in July 2026, the single largest listed beneficiary of the AI build-out anywhere in Europe. That tension is the whole story of this list.

Below is the ranking, the methodology behind it, and an honest account of the judgement calls we made — because on this particular question, the methodology is the article.

Key takeaways

• Schneider Electric dominates. At €155.6bn it is worth about 40% of this entire top 10 combined, and more than the four pure-play technology names on the list (STMicroelectronics, Dassault Systèmes, Capgemini, Soitec) added together.
• France’s top 10 tech companies are collectively worth ~€384bn — less than LVMH, L’Oréal and Hermès combined (~€607bn). France remains a luxury economy with a strong technology sector, not the reverse.
• 2026 has split the sector in two. Anything selling picks and shovels to the AI build-out (Schneider, Legrand, STMicro, Soitec) has re-rated hard. Anything selling software or IT labour (Dassault Systèmes, Capgemini) has been de-rated on fears that AI eats the business model.
• France’s most valuable AI company isn’t listed. Mistral AI’s last confirmed valuation was €11.7bn, with reported talks at ~€20bn — which would place it 7th on this list, ahead of Capgemini.

Methodology: how we built this ranking

Rankings like this one live or die on definitions, so here are ours in full.

What counts as a “French tech company.” A publicly listed company whose enterprise value is primarily driven by technology — semiconductors, software, IT services, electronics, or connected digital infrastructure — and whose home market is France, evidenced by French headquarters, a primary listing on Euronext Paris, and/or CAC 40 membership.

Where this diverges from GICS. Standard sector classification puts Schneider Electric and Legrand in Industrials, Thales in Aerospace & Defence, and Orange in Communication Services. We include all four, because a reader searching for France’s biggest technology companies is asking an economic question, not a taxonomy question — and because Legrand now derives ~30% of sales from data centres, which is not a building-products business. We flag every divergence in the table below, and we publish a strict pure-play alternative ranking further down so you can use whichever definition fits your purpose.

Data source and currency. Market capitalisations are taken from CompaniesMarketCap’s euro-denominated France ranking, snapshotted 17 July 2026, cross-checked against Yahoo Finance and Investing.com. All figures in euros. STMicroelectronics is the one exception — see below.

Known limitations. Market caps move every second; the ordering below the top five is genuinely fragile, and positions 9 through 12 sit within roughly €1bn of each other. Figures reflect total market capitalisation, not free float. Where sources disagreed by more than ~3%, we say so rather than silently picking the flattering number.

The STMicroelectronics problem. STMicro is incorporated in the Netherlands and headquartered near Geneva. It is also a CAC 40 constituent, part-owned by the French state through a Franco-Italian holding structure alongside Bpifrance, and runs major fabs at Crolles, Grenoble, Tours and Rousset. It does not appear on France-domiciled screens, which is precisely why most competing lists omit Europe’s second-most-valuable “French” tech company. We include it and label it clearly. Its figure (~€50bn) is our own cross-check of several sources rather than a single screen, and carries wider error bars than the rest.

The 10 biggest tech companies in France by market cap (July 2026)

Snapshot: 17 July 2026. Combined value ≈ €384bn.

1. Schneider Electric — €155.6bn

Why it’s here: Schneider sells the electrical spine of a data centre — switchgear, busways, UPS systems, liquid cooling, plus the software (EcoStruxure, AVEVA) that runs it. When a hyperscaler builds a gigawatt campus, Schneider gets paid before a single GPU is racked.

The 2026 story: Q1 2026 revenue hit a record €9.77bn, up 11.2% organically, with energy management up nearly 13% and data centres leading growth. The company signed roughly $2.3bn of new contracts with Switch and Digital Realty alone, and struck AI-infrastructure partnerships with NVIDIA, Foxconn and SK Telecom. CEO Olivier Blum frames it as “the Fifth Revolution.” Analysts are broadly along for the ride, with Citi and JPMorgan targets in the €325–340 range.

The bear case, honestly stated: currency is biting hard — management flagged FX headwinds of roughly €750–850m to full-year margins — and Schneider now trades on expectations that assume the AI capex cycle does not break. It is a cyclical business wearing a structural-growth multiple.

2. STMicroelectronics — ~€50bn

Why it’s here: Europe’s largest chipmaker by volume across analog, power, MEMS and embedded processing, with ~48,000 employees and deep French industrial roots.

The 2026 story: the most dramatic re-rating on this list. STMicro’s market cap has more than doubled year-on-year, recovering from a brutal automotive and industrial inventory correction that bottomed around $25bn in mid-2025. Trailing earnings remain depressed — the stock’s TTM P/E is above 400, which tells you the market is paying for the recovery, not the past year. TD Cowen lifted its target to $70 from $50 in July; Morgan Stanley and Jefferies both carry Buy ratings. The company is pushing hard into edge-AI silicon, silicon photonics (PIC100) and SiC power.

Caveat: the €50bn figure is our cross-check across Yahoo Finance, Investing.com and stockanalysis.com, converted at prevailing rates. Treat it as ±5%.

3. Thales — €47.1bn

Why it’s here: Thales is a technology company that happens to point some of its technology at threats — radar, electronic warfare, secure comms, avionics, satellite payloads, plus a genuine cybersecurity and digital identity business.

The 2026 story: European rearmament is doing the heavy lifting. Q1 2026 defence order intake jumped to €2,240m from €1,306m a year earlier — up 75% at constant scope and FX. The group booked seven orders above €100m in the quarter, including Danish SAMP/T NG air defence and French nuclear deterrence modernisation. 2025 sales were €22.1bn, with €4.5bn a year going into R&D across AI, quantum, cyber and cloud.

The friction: the Cyber & Digital division remains the problem child, weighing on margins even as Defence and Aerospace outperform. Analysts’ consensus target sits near €295 against a share price around €229 — a wide gap that reflects unresolved questions about the French budget, not the order book.

4. Orange — €41.9bn

Why it’s here: France’s incumbent telecoms operator, and by some distance the country’s largest owner of digital infrastructure — fibre, mobile networks, data centres, plus Orange Business for enterprise IT and Orange Cyberdefense.

The 2026 story: Orange is the value stock of this list. It is not a growth asset and has not pretended to be one for a decade. What it offers is cash generation, a dividend, dominant French fibre economics, and an under-modelled African business where Orange Money is a genuine fintech franchise rather than a rounding error.

Why the market shrugs: European telecoms remain structurally capital-hungry and competitively fragmented, and every consolidation thesis has run aground on regulators for fifteen years running.

5. Legrand — €37.9bn

Why it’s here: Legrand has quietly stopped being a light-switch company. Data centre activity reached 26% of 2025 sales and management guides to ~30% in 2026 — revenue that has grown nearly sevenfold since 2018 and passed €2bn in 2025.

The 2026 story: Q1 2026 adjusted operating profit rose 11.5% to €524.7m, beating consensus, driven almost entirely by a 29.1% surge in US sales. The group has announced four acquisitions in 2026 alone — Green4T (Brazil), Kratos Industries (US), Keydak (China) and TES — all in data centres and energy transition, adding ~€275m of annual revenue. A Capital Markets Day in Singapore on 29 September 2026 will focus specifically on the data-centre roadmap.

The tension: Legrand’s traditional European construction and renovation markets are still weak, with France, Spain and the UK all declining. CEO Benoît Coquart has said data centres could reach 30% of sales but is unlikely to exceed 60% — residential remains the core.

6. Dassault Systèmes — €24.2bn

Why it’s here: France’s flagship software company and the world leader in mechanical CAD. CATIA is the industry standard in automotive and aerospace; SOLIDWORKS owns the SME market; Medidata leads clinical-trial data capture.

The 2026 story: the most painful chart on this list. The shares have roughly halved over twelve months, trading near €18.38 against a 52-week range of €15.82–€33.16. The cause isn’t a blow-up — it’s a stall. 2025 revenue grew 0.36% to €6.24bn and earnings fell slightly. Goldman Sachs downgraded to Neutral and cut its target to €20 from €29. The market is asking whether generative AI compresses the value of seat-based engineering software, and Dassault has not yet produced an answer that reverses the de-rating.

Worth noting: at ~20x trailing earnings for a business with genuine switching costs and a real moat, the bear case is now priced in rather than speculative. Consensus target sits at €22.82.

7. Capgemini — €15.1bn

Why it’s here: France’s largest IT services group — €22.5bn of 2025 revenue, a 13.3% operating margin, and roughly 340,000 people delivering consulting, cloud migration and managed services.

The 2026 story: brutal. The shares hit a six-year low in June 2026 after Accenture cut full-year guidance and reported negative bookings growth, triggering a sector-wide read-across; Capgemini fell 8.4% in a single session to €89.42 and is down roughly 38% over twelve months. The irony is that the operating business is fine — Q1 2026 revenue rose 7% to nearly €6bn, bookings exceeded €6bn, and gen-AI made up over 10% of Q4 bookings. Management guides to 6.5–8.5% growth for 2026.

Why the market disagrees: the $3.3bn WNS acquisition pushed net debt to ~€5.3bn and, worse, doubled down on business process outsourcing precisely as investors concluded that gen-AI turns BPO from a people business into a software business. As Morgan Stanley put it, the bear case is that incumbents get disrupted by the very technology they’re selling. A controversy over US government contracts and a resulting divestment process hasn’t helped.

8. Edenred — €5.2bn

Why it’s here: a B2B payments platform connecting 60m+ users, 2m merchants and 1m corporate clients across 45 countries. Meal vouchers are the legacy; embedded payments, fleet mobility and EV charging tie-ups (Tesla Supercharger, Daimler Truck) are the pitch.

The 2026 story: regulation, twice. Italy capped merchant fees; Brazil’s presidential decree then capped the merchant discount rate at 3.6% (from ~8%), cut settlement to 15 days and mandated interoperability. Combined run-rate EBITDA impact: roughly €320m — about a quarter of 2024 EBITDA. Management has rebased 2026 to an EBITDA decline of 8–12%, against a prior forecast of +2% to +4%. The stock is down more than 60% from its 2023 peak.

The live question: Edenred confirmed approaches from investment funds after reports that BC Partners explored a buyout, with chatter around €27–28 per share against a market price near €22.50. Nothing formal has been announced.

9. Soitec — €4.2bn

Why it’s here: Soitec makes engineered substrates — silicon-on-insulator wafers that foundries like Samsung and GlobalFoundries use to build more efficient chips without shrinking the node. A small company with a genuine technological chokehold.

The 2026 story: the wildest ride in French tech. The 52-week range is €22.62 to €200.50. FY26 free cash flow came in at €63m against a €6m consensus, revenue beat at €592m, and Photonics-SOI crossed $100m earlier than guided — with Morgan Stanley back-calculating 60–70% growth to ~$130m and Bernstein flagging the first explicit management confirmation of co-packaged optics qualification volumes. Co-packaged optics is the reason this stock exists in the AI conversation at all.

Read this twice: gross margin collapsed to 16.3% from 32.1%, missing consensus badly. Simply Wall St’s DCF implies fair value near €16 against a market price above €100. New CEO Laurent Remont took over in April. This is a genuinely speculative asset, and its position on this list could change by €1bn in a week.

10. Eutelsat — €2.9bn

Why it’s here: Europe’s answer to Starlink, at roughly 1/100th of the scale. The 2023 OneWeb merger gave Eutelsat a LEO constellation to pair with its GEO fleet, making it the only European operator with both.

The 2026 story: Eutelsat is a policy trade as much as a technology one. European sovereign connectivity — IRIS², defence communications, non-reliance on American infrastructure — is the entire thesis, and the French state has backed it with capital. Thales’ GovSat win for a Luxembourg defence satellite is a reminder of how much of this ecosystem is state-shaped.

Be clear-eyed: the balance sheet is heavy, the share price sits near €2.50, and competing against SpaceX’s launch economics with someone else’s launch economics is a structural problem no subsidy fully solves.

Photo finish: positions 10 through 12 are effectively tied — Teleperformance (€2.91bn) and Sopra Steria (€2.83bn) sit within €0.1bn of Eutelsat and could swap in on any given day. OVHcloud (€2.21bn), VusionGroup (€2.12bn), Exail Technologies (€2.05bn) and Alten (€1.91bn) are the next tier.

The pure-play ranking (strict Info-Tech definition)

If you exclude anything a classifier wouldn’t call technology, the list looks very different — and much smaller:

1. STMicroelectronics — ~€50bn
2. Dassault Systèmes — €24.2bn
3. Capgemini — €15.1bn
4. Soitec — €4.2bn
5. Sopra Steria — €2.8bn
6. OVHcloud — €2.2bn
7. VusionGroup — €2.1bn
8. Alten — €1.9bn

Total: roughly €102bn — less than two-thirds of Hermès’ market capitalisation on its own. That is the honest measure of French pure-play listed technology, and a useful corrective to any narrative about France as a tech superpower.

The 2026 divide: infrastructure won, software lost

The clearest pattern in this data isn’t French at all — France just displays it unusually well, because it happens to host both sides of the trade.

The picks-and-shovels side has been repriced upward. Schneider (data-centre electrical), Legrand (data-centre power distribution), STMicro (edge-AI and power silicon) and Soitec (photonics substrates) have all re-rated on the same thesis: AI needs physical infrastructure, and physical infrastructure has lead times, capital intensity and incumbency. Schneider’s own framing is instructive — the AI boom reaches it as demand for energy and the systems that control it, not for compute.

The software and services side has been repriced downward. Dassault Systèmes has halved. Capgemini is at a six-year low. Both sell into the same AI wave, both report perfectly respectable bookings, and both are being marked down on the suspicion that AI compresses what customers will pay for seats and for hours. Note that the June 2026 sell-off dragged SAP, Sage, Wolters Kluwer, Planisware and TeamViewer down with them — this is a European sector view, not a French one.

Whether that’s a permanent re-rating or an overshoot is the single most valuable question an investor in French tech can answer right now. This article does not pretend to know.

Notable omissions and the judgement calls behind them

• Airbus — Dutch-registered, Toulouse-headquartered, Franco-German-Spanish. A magnificent technology business and not, by any reasonable reading, a French company. Excluded.
• Safran (€145.2bn) — aero-engines and avionics. Would rank #2 on a looser definition. We drew the line at “technology company,” not “company with technology in it.” Reasonable people disagree.
• Publicis Groupe (€21.0bn) — an advertising group with a serious data asset in Epsilon. Would rank #7. Excluded as marketing services.
• Dassault Aviation (€22.7bn) — builds Rafales. Aerospace, not tech.
• Atos — once a €10bn+ IT champion, now trading around $1.2bn after one of the more instructive corporate collapses in recent French history.
• Criteo — French SA, Nasdaq-listed adtech. Excluded for primary listing, but worth knowing about.

The shadow ranking: France’s private tech giants

The most important French AI company doesn’t appear anywhere above, because it isn’t listed.

Mistral AI raised a €1.7bn Series C in September 2025 at a €11.7bn post-money valuation, led by ASML — which took an 11% stake for €1.3bn, an unusual move for a lithography company and a meaningful strategic signal. In March 2026 Mistral added $830m in debt from a consortium of seven banks, earmarked for 13,800 NVIDIA chips in a data centre near Paris. Reported annualised revenue passed $400m, with a stated target above $1bn ARR by end-2026.

In June 2026, Bloomberg reported Mistral in early talks to raise ~€3bn at roughly a €20bn valuation — nearly double the Series C. Those talks were reported as early-stage and unconfirmed at the time of writing; treat the €20bn as a signal, not a fact.

If it closes at that level, Mistral would slot in at #7 on this list — just behind Dassault Systèmes, comfortably ahead of Capgemini, and worth roughly as much as Capgemini and Edenred put together. A three-year-old company would outrank France’s largest IT services group.

FAQ

What is the biggest tech company in France? Schneider Electric, at approximately €155.6 billion (July 2026). If you restrict the definition to companies formally classified in the Information Technology sector, it’s STMicroelectronics at ~€50bn.

Is Schneider Electric really a tech company? Depends who’s asking. GICS files it under Industrials. But it derives a large and growing share of revenue from data-centre power and cooling, owns AVEVA’s industrial software, and partners with NVIDIA and Foxconn on AI infrastructure reference designs. Economically, it is one of Europe’s most AI-levered listed companies.

Is STMicroelectronics a French company? Partly. It’s incorporated in the Netherlands and headquartered in Switzerland, but it’s Franco-Italian by ownership — the French state holds a stake via Bpifrance through a joint holding structure — sits in the CAC 40, and operates major fabs in France. Most lists exclude it on a technicality; we include it with the caveat attached.

What is the biggest French software company? Dassault Systèmes (€24.2bn), maker of CATIA, SOLIDWORKS and Medidata.

Why did French tech stocks fall in 2026? Software and IT services did — semiconductors and infrastructure did not. The June 2026 sell-off followed Accenture cutting guidance and reporting negative bookings growth, which the market read as evidence that generative AI structurally reduces demand for IT consulting. Capgemini hit a six-year low; the move hit SAP, Sage and other European software names too.

How much is Mistral AI worth? €11.7bn at its last confirmed round (Series C, September 2025). Bloomberg reported talks in June 2026 at roughly €20bn, unconfirmed at the time of writing.

Are these figures live? No. This is a snapshot dated 17 July 2026. Market caps change every trading second, and the bottom half of this list is genuinely volatile — Soitec’s 52-week range spans a 9x move.

Sources

CompaniesMarketCap (France ranking, EUR, 17 July 2026) · Yahoo Finance · Investing.com · Reuters · Bloomberg · Company releases: Schneider Electric Q1 2026, Legrand FY2025 & Q1 2026, Thales Q1 2026, Capgemini FY2025, Soitec FY2026, Edenred FY2025, Mistral AI Series C announcement · Morningstar · Bernstein, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, TD Cowen and Kepler Cheuvreux research as reported in the financial press.

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