I've never heard such a statement from German companies (and I live in Germany). Related to industrial espionage are rather China (for obvious reasons) and the United States (the latter even before Snowden: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enercon#Industriespionage.3F_De...).
> In a 2009 US diplomatic cable revealed by Wikileaks, an unnamed German CEO of a satellite manufacturer was quoted calling France “the evil empire, stealing technology, and Germany knows this”, adding that French industrial spying was doing as much damage as anything coming from Russia or China
> Colourful stories about the lengths the French secret services would go to emerged in the early 1990s, such as the bugging of seats on Air France planes to eavesdrop on American business leaders.
> At the time, then-CIA director Stansfield Turner qualified French intelligence as “the most predatory service in the world, now that the old Soviet Union is gone”
Every EU country has been playing this game for centuries. It's always stunning to me how much more faith Europeans have in their governments than Americans do, even though they get up to the same kind of shenanigans.
I have no doubt France's intelligence services are just as bad as NSA.
Who are they buying from, then? All of Europe is spying on each other. German companies even refer to France as the "evil empire" of industrial espionage - not the USA. And of course many other countries like China are also spying.
When I hear European politicians lobbying for local hosting services and the like, I think it in part has much more to do with getting more negotiating power at the international surveillance table. NSA had hooks directly into various services that other countries had to bargain with the NSA for, if they can get services hosted in their own countries, they can be the go-to organization and have more bargaining chips.