R & D investments by European companies fell by 2.2% overall in 2020 during the Covid-19 crisis, while everywhere else in the world they are increasing or stagnating, reports the European Commission in a published document for the past year, which analyzes the spending of the world’s top 2,500 investors.
A decline noted for the first time in 10 years, mainly due to difficulties in the automotive, aerospace and defense sectors, as the healthcare and ICT sectors continued to grow, the report shows . The automotive sector in particular, which accounts for nearly a third of R&D in Europe, fell 7.2% in 2020, marked by shortages in the production chain.
These figures put Europe far behind the United States and China in terms of research and development capacity in key sectors of the economy. In the United States as in China, investments increased respectively by 9.1% and 18.1% last year.
However, for Mariya Gabriel, Commissioner for Innovation and Research, “investing in research and innovation is essential to enable European industry to lead the ecological transition, to excel in the growing ICT sector. fast and to be at the forefront of the new wave of disruptive technological innovations ”. And she adds: “The EU industrial R&D investment scoreboard clearly shows in which areas we will need to redouble our efforts, and it invites us to invest today for the future”.
Google, Huawei and Microsoft in the lead
Unsurprisingly, the information and communication technology (ICT) sector is at the top of the rankings, which the report says illustrates the increasing digitization of the global economy. For 2020, the first five places go to American and Asian companies in the digital sector: Alphabet (Google) with 22.5 billion euros invested in R & D in 2020, followed by Huawei (17.5 billion euros) , Microsoft (€ 16.9 billion), Samsung (€ 15.9 billion) and Apple (€ 15.3 billion).
Faced with these giants of the net, European companies are not playing in the same court. While the healthcare and digital services sectors are growing by + 10.3% and + 7.2% respectively, digital services only represent 7.6% of the European Union’s R&D.
From a more general point of view, France is among the countries which recorded the largest decrease in terms of investments (- 8%), with Italy (- 13.7%) and Finland (- 9% ). The first two French companies to appear in the world rankings are the Sanofi and Peugeot groups, with R & D budgets of 5.5 billion euros and 3.6 billion euros respectively.
By way of comparison, the German manufacturer Volkswagen is the first European company in the world ranking, with 13.8 billion euros allocated in research and development.