[boricj]

The days of nationalized French defense companies and state arsenals have been over for quite a while. Assuming I didn't make any mistakes:

GIAT was privatized, then renamed to Nexter, then merged with German KMW to form European KNDS and now it's about to do an IPO.

All of the French aerospace industry (including missiles) bar Dassault and Thales is inside Airbus.

Arquus was bought by Belgian John Cockerill.

I could probably cite more if I dug deeper, but while we still have French defense companies like Dassault, Naval Group and Thales, a fair amount of our defense industry is no longer exclusively French owned.

And if the French government or owner starts getting uppity, you could always take a page from the Swedes and how they Kockums the shit out of ThyssenKrupp.

[lucumo]

The French state owns a 26.6% of the shares in Thales, with 36.4% of the voting rights. The Dassault family has another 30% of the voting rights. A combined controlling share.

The Dassault family has very close ties with the French government and defense industry. There's no doubt in my mind that if the French government gets serious and says "Jump!" Dassault would just ask "How high?"

The situation with Airbus is a little more healthy, with the French government share being much lower (11%), and the German (11%) and Spanish (4%) governments balancing it out a bit. Airbus is also a smaller part of Dutch defense. Still, none of those governments is Dutch.

The fact that the French government owns more of the Dutch defense industry than the Dutch government is a problem.

[boricj]

> The Dassault family has very close ties with the French government and defense industry. There's no doubt in my mind that if the French government gets serious and says "Jump!" Dassault would just ask "How high?"

I'll push back on that point.

The FCAS program was originally conceived as a French-German joint political initiative by Macron and Merkel. The NGF plane within it has been dead in the water for years because Airbus and Dassault can't work out their disagreements. It's a conflict between two industrial companies that's blocking forward progress, with the Airbus and Dassault CEOs duking it out across press releases and shareholder meetings.

If Dassault was a French state puppet, Macron would've strong-armed Dassault into working with Airbus on this €100 billion project by now. Yet, the French President seems to know better than to try and do that. One does not get to be basically the only major private independent defense company in a famously nationalized French defense industry during the Cold War without managing to hold the French state at arm's length, especially during the nationalization years of Mitterand's presidency.

Though your concerns about ownership of the Dutch defense industry are certainly valid, I don't see how the European defense industry could have completely avoided consolidation after the end of the Cold War, given the budget cuts to defense. The Americans went much further on that front and nowadays the lack of internal competition is causing them all kinds of problems for them.

[lucumo]

I looked into the other names you've mentioned.

KNDS is certainly planning to IPO later this year, but with only 20% of the stock free floating. The plans are that the French and German governments will own 40% each.

Arquus is not owned by "Belgian John Cockerill", it is owned by the John Cockerill Group, which in turn is owned by Frenchman Bernard Serin.

Naval Group: 62% owned by the French Government, 25% owned by Thales.

While it's certainly not wholly government-owned, it really doesn't look like a private sector either. For some companies the publicness looks a lot like a fig leaf.