French, Indian SMEs to meet on Dec 4 in Delhi

New Delhi, Nov 10 (UNI) India's uprising as an economic power has invited one more country to take part in the success story with most of the French companies sharing the belief that India has to be included in their business plans.

''It pays to be involved with India...with small and medium enterprises (SMEs) playing a vital part in the Indo-French trade,'' French Ambassador to India Dominique Girard said here today while announcing a four-day Indo-French Business Summit that will start from December 4 in the capital.

With participation by over 900 Indian and 150 French SMEs, the summit promises to hold at least 1,000 meetings among the entrepreneures onj one-on-one basis.

In view of French Foreign Trade Minister Christine Lagarde's annoncement last month that it will bring 500 multi-sector French SMEs into India by 2008, the summit can prove to be the first strp towards this.

''The task now is to match these 150 (participating) companies with their 900 Indian counterparts, who have already registered themselves with us,'' Mr Girard said.

The summit will cover aviation, energy, biotechnology, IT, food processing, pharma, environment technology and automobiles.

Yesterday, Mahindra and Mahindra and French auto major Renault SA announced their plans to jointly form a greenfield site to manufacture five lakh cars per annum.

Indo-French bilateral trade has seen a growth of 26 per cent per annum at four billion euros with France holding a 1.9 per cent market share in the total trade in India. French exports to India accounted for two billion euros last year, rising on a rate of 45 per cent every year.

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