France's Stim grows in a falling market: a Tenerife studio, 100+ hires and a demand for AI literacy

While European animation lives in a mode of shrinking budgets and a shortage of orders, the French service studio Stim is heading in the opposite direction: in June it opened a fourth production site — in Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the Canary Islands — and is preparing a mass hiring drive for it. By mid-2027 the studio expects to grow the new site's headcount to more than a hundred people.

The calculation rests on the Canary Islands tax regime: it returns 54% of costs on the first million euros and 45% on all further spending, and the rebate covers more than just payroll. Altogether that comes to about 49% back — in the words of Stim co-founder and CEO Jordan Soler, a tool like this either doubles a project's budget or halves it, depending on which side you look at it from. Soler calls it his main argument in negotiations with producers.

A contractor that on principle makes nothing of its own

Stim was founded in 2019 by ESMA graduates Jordan Soler and Félix Ferrand — they met while studying in Montpellier, shared a flat, worked at Illumination and other companies after graduating and kept doing joint projects. The studio grew out of a stream of freelance asset-creation orders: instead of turning work down, the partners began hiring and training artists. Ferrand specialised in rigging, facial animation and modelling, Soler in look dev and grooming; they assembled the studio "horizontally", adding different profiles, and this year they reached full-cycle production of series and features.

A point of principle: Stim deliberately does not produce its own projects. The logic is simple — the studio's clients are producers themselves, and competing with them would mean creating double standards. Soler contrasts his model with those service studios that combine the roles of producer, contractor and sometimes distributor: a contractor with its own slate inevitably sets priorities in its own favour.

Another element of the model grew out of the same position: the studio discusses projects with producers in detail and advises them on financing — tax rebates, public funds, gap financing schemes — and where necessary adapts the pipeline to a specific project. Soler describes that role as a partner's rather than a purely executional one.

The France — Belgium — Spain triangle

Before Tenerife the studio had sites in Lyon and Angoulême in France and in Liège in Belgium. Spain became the third European country by design: it has a large talent pool, and the France — Belgium — Spain triangle is, in Soler's words, interesting and competitive in terms of production capacity. Each site has its own fully staffed team, which makes it possible to run both local projects and projects distributed across the studios.

In parallel, Stim has reassembled its client portfolio: in recent years the studio has cut the number of customers and focused on larger projects. Today it works as a single contracting point for Mediawan, Ellipse Animation and a number of other European companies, which ask it to quote on all their new projects. Among the recent results is the first feature produced entirely by the studio, The Girl in the Clouds for Brio Films, released in French cinemas in the summer of 2026. On the other side of the Atlantic, Stim took part in the production of Coyote vs. Acme.

Hiring in Tenerife: generalists who aren't afraid of neural networks

The wording of the coming recruitment drive is telling. The studio needs specialists with a broad set of skills, able to move between departments as a project progresses — team players for a flexible European team working to international standards. As a separate point: people who know AI, understand it and are not afraid of it. Soler clarifies that this is not about pointless round-the-clock prompting, but about keeping up with the level of technological development and remaining in demand; otherwise, in his words, French animation will once again fall ten years behind American companies, as has happened before.

The next goal is North American clients. The argument Stim intends to come to them with: to prove to producers that a project with a six-figure budget can be no worse than a seven- or eight-figure feature. This rests on an R&D approach and on assembling production around a specific client request.

Why contractors grow when the market contracts

Stim's story looks like a particular case of a broader process. Against a backdrop of fewer orders and trimmed budgets, producers are looking not so much for cheap production as for predictable production: a studio that can put together the financing structure, distribute the work across jurisdictions with different rebates and not miss deadlines. A contractor embedded in several tax regimes at once wins out in that configuration over a single studio in a single country, and the geography of where the work is placed becomes part of the offer on a par with production capacity.

The refusal to make its own projects also reads here as a market signal. In recent years service studios have moved noticeably towards their own IP, which was considered a way to reduce dependence on the client. Stim's bet on the opposite suggests that in a downturn the role of a reliable partner may prove more durable than that of a fledgling producer whose projects compete for the same money.

The requirement that candidates be conversant with neural networks is another signal. If such wording takes hold in the job ads of European studios, the profile of the artist in demand will change: value will shift towards people who cover several stages of the pipeline and understand where the new tools genuinely save time. For narrow specialists that probably means tougher competition; for generalists, wider opportunities. If the trend continues, the fight for contracts in Europe will depend more and more on how quickly a studio rebuilds production around the client's terms, and not only on the rate per man-hour.

Will the Canary rebates be enough for Stim to keep 100+ people on in a falling market? Or will the bet on AI skills turn out to matter more than the tax arithmetic?