ABSTRACT
Firms in the French car industry have gone back into the black over the past decade and a half, achieving quite exemplary levels of profitability. There are several reasons for this, but this chapter deals with only one, namely the increase in productivity gains and, more particularly, the new sources of these gains. We shall not concern ourselves here, therefore, with the scale of this increase in productivity gains, nor with the methods of calculating it, still less with the product strategies of the various car firms. I shall base my argument on the fact that considerable gains of between 5 and 12 per cent per year have been realized in the production processes under study. In general, the firms in question are large firms or networks of firms, but they include some small and medium-sized firms.
