AFNOR General Meeting: excellence calls for resilience

On June 30, 2025, the Association Française de Normalisation (AFNOR) held its annual general meeting in Saint-Denis, France, to present the results of the past year and to outline its future activities. The Board of Directors then met under the chairmanship of Guy Maugis, who has been confirmed in this position, and who will continue until June 2026, the year of AFNOR’s centenary, his mandate begun three years earlier.

The members of the French Standards Association, who numbered over 1,600 at December 31, 2024, approved the year’s moral and financial report. On the scope of standardization and standards publishing activities, the object of the association’s general interest mission, the financial results show a positive net result of €1.8 million, based on sales of €76.6 million, excluding public subsidies (€7.9 million). These figures can be consulted in the 2024 Activity and Social Responsibility Report, available here .

These results, bolstered by those of the subsidiaries, the international network and the new AFNOR BAO business , provide the Group with a welcome respite from the difficulties that lie ahead. Indeed, the next financial year, starting in 2025, will have to do almost entirely without the subsidy paid by the French government to support the Group’s public-interest mission. The only thing to be maintained is a 50% contribution to the financing of subscriptions to European and international standardization organizations, to which AFNOR must necessarily belong in order to ensure its mission of representation.

Preserving France’s capacity for influence

The new geopolitical situation will also require tenacity. Faced with those who are disappointed by multilateralism and those who do not want to trade in circles, we must reiterate that standardization will always be a positive-sum game, which is played by many, seeks consensus and prefers to avoid bilateral power struggles “, write Guy Maugis, Chairman of AFNOR, and Olivier Peyrat, Chief Executive Officer, in the preface to their annual report.

Efforts must also be made to defend France’s capacity for influence on the international standardization scene. The 2025 edition of the International Standardization Barometer, which measures the volume of voluntary standardization work carried out by each country at ISO, IEC, CEN and Cenelec, highlights the rise of China as a leader in strategic areas such as ports and logistics. At ISO, for the first time, the country ranks^3rd if we stop counting on December 31, 2024, relegating France to^5th place.

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