From Industrial Partnership to Founder Relationships: A Conversation with the Eurazeo Future Industries Team on Trust in Cross-Border Investment

Taiwan–Europe collaboration does not only happen between governments. It also happens between investors, industrial corporates, and the innovation ecosystems each of them supports.

I was glad to have the chance to interview Eurazeo, one of Europe’s large private-market investment platforms, and to bring its perspective to Taiwan’s industrial and investment community and to the La French Tech Taiwan network.

Eurazeo’s platform spans private equity, private debt and real assets. I spoke with Ernest Xue, Managing Director in the Future Industries team, and our conversation focused on the fund under the Future Industries strategy.

The strategy is built around a broad question: how technology can help economies and industries respond to growing constraints on energy, materials, labour and other critical resources. It covers five areas: energy transition; supply chain and mobility; manufacturing and industry; critical resources such as minerals, land, air and water; and the built environment with a focus on technologies that improve efficiency, resilience, productivity and the way essential systems are built and operated.

What I wanted to understand was this: where do Taiwan’s manufacturing and technology capabilities intersect with how a European investor is positioning itself? And how might both sides build collaboration and trust starting from concrete industrial needs rather than from stated intent?

Relationships that only become visible over time

What stayed with me from this conversation were the relationships that only come into view when you lengthen the time frame.

Eurazeo’s contact with Taiwan predates the current wave of AI. Ernest mentioned that the team first opened conversations with the Taiwanese market around five years ago, and that the group has been operating in Asia for roughly fifteen years.

That time scale matters. When an investment team has been through cycles in several markets, it starts to see more clearly how technologies travel, where business models need to change, and how relationships with corporates and investors actually form.

One distinction that came up was between parts of Asia that are major producers of industrial technology and capability, and parts of Asia that are increasingly important adopters.

Taiwan, Japan, Korea and China have built deep capabilities in manufacturing, components, electronics, automation and industrial systems. India and Southeast Asia, meanwhile, are seeing rapid growth in demand driven by urbanisation, industrialisation, energy needs, logistics and infrastructure.

But technologies do not simply move from one market to another unchanged.

In emerging Asia, affordability can be decisive. A technically strong solution may still fail to scale if the economics do not work locally. That can require different financing models, lower upfront capex, local manufacturing, different service structures or changes in product specification.

As Ernest put it, this is not only technology transfer. It is technology and business-model adaptation.

For industrial and climate technologies in particular, the economic case has to work alongside the sustainability case.

Taiwan’s role is emerging from work that already exists

Ernest noted that over the last fund cycle, collaboration between portfolio companies and Taiwanese businesses increased, and the team reviewed a growing number of Taiwanese companies.

The team has looked at businesses in automotive supply chain, electronics, telematics and industrial technologies. More recently, it has also been looking at physical AI applications in manufacturing, including robotics, automation, machine vision and AI used in production environments and plant operations.

Building a new plant in Europe, Southeast Asia, India or the United States still depends on access to controls, electronics, automation, components, software and systems integration. Taiwan has spent decades building many of these capabilities.

Ernest also noted that several Eurazeo portfolio companies already source components from Taiwanese suppliers. That makes Taiwan less of a theoretical new market and more of an existing part of the portfolio’s industrial supply chain.

The opportunity, then, is to make some of those relationships more deliberate.

A Taiwanese supplier may become a broader industrial partner. A portfolio company may need help finding a technical or manufacturing partner. A Taiwanese company may want better access to European customers or support expanding into other Asian markets.

Seen this way, Taiwan sits at an important intersection between European industrial demand, developed Asian manufacturing capability and the growth markets of emerging Asia.

Reading investment direction through resource scarcity

The five themes under the Future Industries strategy sound broad, but the underlying question is specific: how do you increase the efficiency of a system operating under constraints?

Those constraints may be energy, materials, labour, land, water or environmental conditions.

The technologies that follow from that question often sit in control systems, sensing, power electronics, automation, edge computing and applied AI. Taiwan’s industrial base intersects with a great deal of that.

For me, this is also a reminder for Taiwanese companies.

In conversations with international investors, technical specifications are often the easy part. What is more useful is to make explicit which industrial problem the technology solves, which markets it can be deployed in, and how it could help the investor’s existing portfolio grow.

A component supplier becomes more strategically interesting when the investor can see how that capability could help one of its companies localise manufacturing, enter a new market or improve its cost base.

We also touched on Taiwan as a listing venue. Ernest spoke about liquidity and the ability to attract analyst attention, a reminder that Taiwan may have a role not only in the supply chain but in the capital-markets path a company takes as it grows. That remains, of course, a judgement to be made company by company.

Collaboration can start with one concrete need

One point I agreed with is that a relationship can develop in stages.

Sharing deal flow, exchanging views on a market, understanding what a company actually needs, any of these can be a starting point. As familiarity grows, commercial collaboration, co-investment or investment into the fund become things worth exploring.

This is also how Eurazeo has built relationships with corporates and sovereign investors elsewhere in Asia.

Those relationships take time. Trust tends to build through repeated examples of where each side can actually be useful.

That might mean sharing an investment opportunity, creating a co-investment, helping a portfolio company enter a market, introducing a technology, or connecting an Asian corporate with a European industrial partner.

Only later does the capital relationship often deepen.

For Taiwanese companies and investors, the useful question may therefore be: can we find one thing to do together first? It might be helping a portfolio company find a technical partner, clarifying the supply chain of an unfamiliar market, introducing a European customer, or looking at one co-investment together. Concrete exchanges like these are how each side learns how the other judges, communicates and keeps commitments.

When something goes wrong, who does the founder call first?

Trust returned as the central theme when we moved to the relationship between investors and founders.

Ernest described trust in the founders as a precondition for investing. As a minority investor, the fund participates in governance and major strategic discussions through its board seat, while leaving the running of the company to the management team.

That model only works if problems are surfaced early.

One remark stayed with me: when something goes wrong, an investor should work to be the first person a founder is willing to call, not the last.

That says something important about how Eurazeo thinks about governance. The goal is not simply to monitor the company. It is to build enough trust that difficult information comes out early enough to be useful.

Exits start long before the transaction

That same trust becomes important when an exit eventually comes into view.

Ernest described Eurazeo’s approach as underwriting exit optionality rather than planning one predetermined exit from the beginning.

An investor wants to know there are several possible outcomes for a company, a strategic buyer, another financial investor, perhaps the public markets but that does not mean the company should be managed against a countdown to a sale.

In practice, much of exit preparation looks like ordinary company building: strong governance, reliable reporting, clean IP ownership, management depth, customer diversification and sound economics.

The best exit preparation, in other words, is often simply building a better company.

The relationship with potential acquirers also starts long before a formal process. A buyer may already be a customer, supplier, strategic partner or investor.

On the personal side, an exit is not only valuation, terms and timing.It also involves what a founder feels about the company, and what they want from the next stage of their own life.

For an investor, an exit may look like a transaction. For a founder, it may represent ten or fifteen years of their life. Understanding that difference requires a conversation that began long before the transaction.

It also explains why a successful exit is not only about maximising the price. It is also about whether the new owner has a credible plan for the company and whether the founder, management team and shareholders are aligned on what happens next.

Trust compounds through use

Between investors and industrial partners, that may mean solving one supply-chain problem, working through one co-investment, or helping one company enter a new market.

Between an investor and a founder, it may mean dealing with a difficult quarter, a customer loss, a financing issue or an acquisition decision before ever reaching an exit.

The relationship becomes valuable not because both sides have said they want to collaborate, but because they have already had reasons to rely on each other.

That, to me, is what cross-border collaboration comes down to. The most durable relationships are built through repeated exchanges of information, work done together, and difficult decisions taken jointly.