Brussels, 12/12/2005 (Agence Europe) - Presenting the second EU scoreboard on investment in industry research and development, on 9 December, the European Commission laid emphasis on the example of the European company Daimler-Chrysler, which invests more in research and development than any other company in the world. However, this success should not detract from the enormous gap between R&D effort on the part of European companies and investments made by the 700 largest companies outside the EU. The EU's counter-performance is such that the overall effort in terms of research (1.92% of GNI in 2003) fell in 2004 (1.90% of GNI), even though an objective of 3% was included in the Lisbon Strategy. Within the EU, companies account for just 54.3% of overall effort, whereas this figure is 60.1% in China, 63.1% in the United States and 74.5% in Japan. Of the 10 largest investors in the world, only three are European companies, all of them German: Daimler-Chrysler, Siemens and Volkswagen. Having fallen back by 2% in 2003, investment in research by the 700 largest companies in Europe grew by 0.7% in 2004. Outside the EU, research expenditure by the 700 top companies is on a constant increase: 4% in 2003 and 6.9% in 2004. All sectors are lagging behind, with the exception of automotives. The pharmaceutical industry invests more in Europe than in Japan, but less than in the United States. Although lower in volume, the rates of investment in the chemical and electronics sectors remain high compared to other sectors. According to Janez Potoènik, Commissioner in charge of Science and Research, "the 2005 edition of the score board leaves room for a certain amount of optimism, but it also shows the scale of the task ahead of us, if we want the EU to become a genuine knowledge-based economy. I call on the governments not to lose their impetus. We have many excellent, high-achieving European companies, but if we want more of them, we will have to redouble our coherence and ambition to establish the proper conditions for R&D and innovation in every Member State. We need the governments and companies to increase their investment in research, in quantity, but also in quality".
Overall, the 1400 companies featuring in this 2005 edition (700 companies registered within the EU and 700 outside it) have invested 315 billion EUR in R&D. On the basis of the data available from the companies as of 1 August this year, the scoreboard shows an upturn of the rate of growth in investment in R&D for European companies, which has gone from a drop of 2% last year to a rise of 0.7% this. The scoreboard also indicates that the largest companies in Europe are just as ready to invest in R&D as their competitors outside the EU: nine of the 25 largest investors of the world are based on the EU, and 45% of the 700 largest European companies have increased their investment in R&D by over 5% this year. The entire text of the scoreboard can be consulted at the following address: http: //eu-iriscoreboard.jrc.es/ ).