For one thing, sales taxes are on revenues rather than profits (because the entire price is profit to somebody, and otherwise you're giving incentive to corporate shell games again), and that means the tax could exceed the profit to the entity making the decision.
Also, any non-zero profits aren't necessarily better than the alternative, because the alternative is to deploy the same capital somewhere else. Your factory is producing as many widgets as it can for a unit cost of $5, France was paying $10, now with tax you're only seeing $7.50 of that, but people in Oregon (no sales tax) would pay $9.75 so it's now more profitable to sell to them instead. Or you could stop making widgets entirely and turn your factory into condos if that's now more profitable. For that to make sense the profit from widgets doesn't have to be zero, only less than what you can get from doing something else.
Meanwhile if the customer in France still wants the widget, they can get it, but they've got to pay enough so that the after-tax price is still ~$10. So in that case the company keeps making widgets and selling them to France but it's the customer eating the tax.
1. It avoids endless arguments about where the profit is 'really' made, i.e. relative arguments about the value of labour vs capital vs equipment vs offices etc. However bad or stupid you think these arguments are, those would be far worse.
2. Corporation taxes are highly inefficient taxes to begin with. It puts countries in a form of competition that should drive corporation tax down to zero, which economists believe is a better state to be in.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/05/24/french-t...
This is fundamentally the right answer, but don't underestimate the political difficulty in getting there.
Taxing "profits" in the location of the headquarters was always a seduction. You have an international company paying developers in California, manufacturing products in China, selling them in Germany, but if their headquarters is in France then France gets a cut of the profit from all of that whether they had anything to do with it or not. Very nice deal for France.
Until Ireland sets a lower rate and the company moves their headquarters there, and then the crying starts. No, it was a stupid way to tax from the start, not when they moved the headquarters to Ireland.
But you tax capital and labor and sales, well, the implications of that are different. Now if they have operations and employees where you are, they can't avoid the tax, except by moving out. But uh oh, if the taxes are too high they might do exactly that, so now you've got to worry about the rate again if you don't want to lose jobs to other countries. Or your people would have to accept lower salaries to keep that from happening. And on top of that if you lose the jobs you still lose the tax revenue.
The company also can't avoid taxes on sales if they want to sell to your people, but if the company wasn't in a monopolistic industry to begin with then it could easily be the customers paying most of those taxes and not the company.
So the taxes get paid, but so do the true costs of taxing things heavily. The free money everybody always wanted was never really available. And there may be some wailing and gnashing of teeth as people figure that out.