In France, labour productivity gains within market economy industries have been falling steadily since the beginning of the 1980s. Although this slowdown can be explained by the expansion of the tertiary sector until the end of the 1990s, it has been experienced across almost all sectors since 2000. The growing dispersal of productivity between companies has frequently been highlighted in economic literature as an explanation for this general slowdown. However, in the case of France, the development of this dispersal of productivity is not uniform across sectors and its mechanisms are not comparable. In the industrial sector, this divergence in the productivity of companies is linked to a dropout at the time of the crisis of the least productive firms, whose productivity gains were strongly supported by capital intensive growth, and whose productivity stagnated after the crisis. In the low and medium-tech services, the divergence became clear during the 2000s and was characterised by a stagnation in productivity of the least productive companies, particularly commercial companies, for which employment increased slightly faster than activity. The high-tech service sector has managed to escape this divergence phenomenon. The speed at which the least productive companies catch up in terms of technology has been slowing slightly in the industrial sector and in the low and medium-tech service sector since 2010; this may have been a contributing factor in the slight increase in dispersion within these sectors. However, within the high-tech services, the reduction in dispersion since the middle of the 2000s is not the result of speedier technological catch-up within these companies. Human capital, and in particular the recruitment and employment of engineers and technicians appears to be a significant catalyst for the dissemination of technical progress within the companies.