Agenzia Nova | The former French president Nicolas Sarkozy will lead a mission of local entrepreneurs to Cameroon to explore investment opportunities in the African country and promote new projects. The mission, the date of which is not known, was announced in recent days by the former president himself, who met the president of Cameroon on the occasion of the Paris Olympics Paul Biya.
Sarkozy, who led France from 2007 to 2012, included the mission as part of his legal activities, specializing in relations between international investors. Furthermore, the topic was at the center of the 30-minute conversation with Biya, during which the parties reviewed the issues relating to French investments in Cameroon, as well as the details of the aforementioned mission. An initiative intended to shake up relations between private individuals, after French foreign direct investments (FDI) in the African country are declining: in 2022, these had reached 64 million euros, down compared to the 103 million recorded in 2021.
According to the report on Cameroon’s foreign trade published in April by the National Institute of Statistics, in 2023 France is in second place on the podium of Cameroon’s best customers, behind the Netherlands. With the African country, Paris has conquered a market share of 12,3 percent, while on the other hand Yaoundé’s exports to France are led by liquefied natural gas (47,6 percent), followed by products such as oils of crude oil (23,6 percent), cocoa butter (7 percent), fuels and lubricants (6,1 percent), crude aluminum (3,2 percent), aluminum paste and cocoa (3,2 percent) and sawn wood (3 percent). These products, the report specifies, will represent 2023 percent of exports to France in 96,1. In the same year, France ranked third among Cameroon’s suppliers with a volume of goods of 537,7 tons, equal to 7,6 percent of the market share. Around 200 companies work in the African country and over a hundred branches owned or managed by French citizens.