Ask Javier Muller, Country Director Germany for leading international consultancy Efor to describe Frankfurt, his new home and he keeps coming back to the impressive “productive diversity” offered by the city on the River Main. “My mother is Spanish, my father is French and I myself grew up in Germany, although I studied in Germany & France. That meant I developed an international outlook from an early age and viewed from this angle, Frankfurt offers a really attractive environment,” Muller says. “People from a wide range of different countries work together here, which makes everyone very open-minded and as a newcomer you are quickly made to feel very welcome.”

These soft factors led Efor to open its first German branch in Hessen in 2025. Market analyses by the life sciences consultancy also identified other tangible arguments in favor of Frankfurt. These include the city’s closeness to key customers and global market leaders already based in the Rhine-Main area and neighboring regions, allowing Efor to provide even broader support. 

Efor has built its success on its mix of deep specialization and broad-based positioning. While it has clearly defined its scope as a consultancy for the pharmaceuticals, biotech and medtech sectors, its services focus mainly on compliance engineering activities such as engineering, commissioning, qualification and validation and quality assurance, but the group offers also adjacent activities to cover the entire life cycle, ranging from R&D through the preclinical and clinical stages down to production and marketing. Team members support clients and help them implement their objectives in long-term projects lasting up to several years. In addition, Efor offers internal and supplier audits and trainings. To date, more than 1,000 clients, including 90% of the top 20 pharmaceutical, biotech, and medtech companies, have trusted its services.

It is therefore no surprise that Efor has an ambitious growth strategy. Founded in 2013 in the French city of Lyon, the company had grown to employ roughly 1,000 team members in just seven years. Then, from 2020, Efor’s industrial ambition to build a global leader in compliance engineering started to bring together several specialized consulting firms under one shared vision.

Today, Efor employs 3,200 team members and has branches in 18 countries in Europe, North and South America and Asia. “Not only is Germany Europe’s largest pharmaceuticals market, it’s also the number four worldwide after the USA, China and Japan. This is why we want to grow our team here to 50 members by the end of 2026 and have a medium-term target of 200 to 300 people by 2028. To achieve this, we needed to find a location that will support rapid future growth and that has adequate resources, but that also offers optimal support from the start-up phase onwards," emphasizes Muller.

In Frankfurt, Efor was able to build on the longstanding close economic ties between Hessen and France. The city offers convenient access to many other large French companies that have settled in the region and houses the French Consulate General in its center. It also has close links with Efor’s hometown of Lyon, its oldest sister city partnership.

Concrete support came from CCI France Allemagne, the French Chamber of Commerce in Germany. This organization has been providing expertise and wide-ranging networking opportunities to French companies wanting to expand their business in Germany since 1957. Efor also made use of the organization’s professional local support when first setting up. Javier Muller started off by taking space in “Le Booster” – the coworking office center run by the CCI in downtown Frankfurt – when preparing and rapidly implementing Efor’s continued expansion. “The close contact to the French community smoothed the way for me when I arrived. This sort of support really helps you find your feet in a new environment,” he explains.

CCI France Allemagne has also been a partner of Hessen Trade & Invest (HTAI) for many years. Commissioned by the Hessen state government to attract international companies to the state, HTAI provides these enterprises with long-term support. This allowed Efor to leverage HTAI’s expertise to become part of the life sciences ecosystem here. At the same time, the Club des Affaires de la Hesse – the core Franco-German business club for Frankfurt, the Rhine-Main region and Hessen – offered professional and personal networking opportunities within the important French business community. More than 400 branches of firms from Germany’s neighboring country have a presence in the region and nearly 17,000 French nationals live here.

Despite this, close binational ties are not the only decisive factor for a globally successful company such as Efor: the location’s international focus is another. “Going forward, we will employ many team members from Germany but also from all the other countries making up our workforce in Frankfurt. This will allow us to blend local and international expertise to optimally support clients,” says Muller. “Frankfurt has become an ideal, multifaceted new home for our equally diverse team, offering everything from the skyscrapers in the bustling city center with its countless bars and restaurants down to the region’s tranquil small villages nestled in peaceful green surroundings. A great mix like this offers real quality of life but is not easy to find.