Germany and France unveiled, on Tuesday 19 February in Berlin, a Franco-German manifesto for a new European industrial policy that includes a plan for car batteries and calls for a revision of the European regulation governing company mergers.
"It is a revolution of minds", assured the French Minister of Economy, Bruno Le Maire, when presenting the manifesto with his German counterpart, Peter Altmaier, at an event attended by German and French industrialists. This manifesto sets out a common framework, the first concrete element of which is a project on the market for batteries for electric vehicles.
For the time being, the names of the companies that will participate in the consortium are not public, particularly because legal issues remain to be clarified in the context of existing partnerships with Korea and China, said a source close to the file.
Above all, France and Germany expect by 1 April, not a final decision, but a "positive sign" from the European Commission on the granting of the status of "important project of common European interest" (IPCEI) to the consortium (see EUROPE 12162). Otherwise, French and German public funding would be considered as state aid, a French source pointed out.
Germany has announced that it will put €1 billion on the table and France €700 million, Peter Altmaier recalled. Other Member States have expressed interest, he stressed, citing Sweden, Poland and Austria. Bruno Le Maire added Italy and Spain to the list. The French Minister will be in Warsaw on Thursday and Friday to discuss this project, among other things. And German Chancellor Angela Merkel will try to rally new countries to the Franco-German industrial initiative at the next European summit, Altmaier said.
The two ministers did not specify where the future plants will be located. However, Peter Altmaier said that a "large chemical company" was considering investing in Lusatia, a mining region close to Poland and to which the German Coal Exit Commission promises billions of euros in investment. There will be two factories with thousands of jobs at stake, a French source promised.
The consortium will have to cover the entire industrial chain, from the exploitation of lithium and cobalt needed for batteries to final construction, Bruno Le Maire insisted, stressing that batteries represent between one third and half of the value of future electric vehicles.
France has contacted Argentina, Chile and Indonesia to work on the issue of rare metal supply, which has so far been dominated by China. Germany does the same, a French source said.
The two countries have also announced "massive" public investments in three other areas essential to European competitiveness: artificial intelligence (see EUROPE 12196), data storage and renewable energy storage.
A "stupid" European competition law
According to Bruno Le Maire, the Franco-German manifesto calls for the removal of one of the "obstacles" to European competitiveness, namely a European competition law "sometimes stupid" and "unsuitable for the 21st century".
As the recent rejection by the European Commission of the merger between Siemens and Alstom served as an "electroshock" (see EUROPE 12188), France and Germany explicitly request the revision of the Merger Regulation (139/2004) and the current guidelines in order to take more account of "the global scale, potential future competition and the time framework". Both countries plead for consideration of "to what extent a right of appeal by the Council could repeal a Commission decision in very precisely defined cases and under strict conditions".
Until now, "we in Europe thought that unbridled competition between Member States was the only solution to competitiveness", said Bruno Le Maire, for whom "France and Germany are now saying - for the first time together - that the current regulations must be changed".
See the Franco-German manifesto: http://bit.ly/2DRmzRr. (Original version in French by Nathalie Steiwer)