High-Tech Companies Make Trek to Toulouse : Technology: France’s fourth-largest city, long dominated by aerospace, is successfully attracting electronics firms.
The area around Toulouse, France’s fourth-largest city in the southwest near the Pyrenees mountains, is turning into a new Silicon Valley with a growing number of high-tech companies.
Like its California model, Toulouse offers an attractive climate and lifestyle to researchers and executives.
It has qualified labor, good transport links and boasts a number of top-level research institutes. But it took a focused marketing effort to convince foreign companies to set up their European sites in and around Toulouse.
Traditionally, Toulouse industry has been dominated by aerospace. Ever since aviation pioneers like Antoine de Saint-Exupery used a Toulouse airstrip, the city has been the center of France’s plane manufacturing industry. Airbus, Aerospatiale and ATR are the big names on an imposing roll call.
But electronics, chemistry and biomedical activities as well as space, computing and biotechnologies are now also booming.
“We try to offer a one-stop service,” said Ignacio Antona, project manager at Technopole Toulousaine, a body promoting the Toulouse area to foreign companies. “We can help with sites, financing and access to research institutes,” he added.
“Our aim is that a foreign company, setting up business here, has the same access to research facilities as a local company,” company chairman Didier Bernadet said.
Access to laboratories was one of the factors that helped Toulouse gain the 150-million franc ($27.7-million) high-tech European plant and research center of Louisville, Colo.-based Storage Technology Corp. despite heavy competition by a Scottish site.
Storagetek makes data storage and retrieval systems, using a robot that quickly picks up data cartridges from a library and puts them in a computer data server.
Jean Barcellini, managing director of the site, said he hoped to start production in April and would have 470 employees in 1998, of which 170 would be researchers. He was now busy hiring staff to start production with 160 people.
More recently, Chicago’s Motorola Inc. semiconductor unit decided to invest another $139 million at Toulouse, where it has been based since 1967, partly in a new joint research laboratory with Toulouse institute LAAS and the CNRS national research center.
One of the research institutes in Toulouse that combine fundamental research with industrial applications is the CERFACS European Center for Research and Advanced Training in Scientific Computation.
In a white, spacious building adorned with in-house gardens, some 50 researchers combine their brainpower with the powerful parallel processing computers to develop such things as a computer model to simulate wind-tunnel testing for aircraft parts.
This cuts time and costs compared with the current practice of building prototype parts and putting them in giant wind tunnel to test future behavior in flight.
Closely linked to France Meteo, it also has a team working on improving weather forecasts. As a tribute to its international standing, it will host the 1995 World Linear Algebra Year.
Not every high-tech start-up firm heads straight for success. ATG Cygnet is one such example.
Founded in 1984 by Alcatel and Thomson-CSF to develop optical discs for information storage, the company went bankrupt in 1986. But it was bought up in early 1987. Thomson remained shareholder but Altus Finance, a unit of bank Credit Lyonnais, took a 49% stake.
Last August, Altus increased its stake to 70% and transferred ownership to another Credit Lyonnaise unit, Innolion. It also brought in a new chairman and chief executive by naming Bernard Meffre. His predecessor had bought the jukebox maker Cygnet in the U.S. for $7 million.
A large jukebox contains a robot arm which picks up optical discs from two or more large stacks and puts them in a reader. Now ATG Cygnet is, with Sony of Japan and LMS of the United States, joint market leader in the field of optical storage on 12-inch discs.
These so-called Write Once Read Many discs each permit the storage of the equivalent of 5,000 books of 500 pages in both text and images.
Large hospitals are using them for patient records while both the FBI in the United States and Scotland Yard in Britain have ordered systems for their files on, for instance, fingerprints.
