Brussels – The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has cost the European Union an additional 127 billion euros. These are the figures cited by Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, in her speech at the WinWin Summit held at the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels. From that podium, von der Leyen today (3 November) also launched an appeal: to ensure that Europe is not simply the place of “great scientific discoveries” but to return to being “the place where those discoveries create new industries and create good and sustainable jobs for the European people.”
According to the President, “Europe starts from a position of strength” because it “accounts for almost 30 per cent of the global patents in clean technologies” and “almost one in three quantum companies worldwide is based in the EU.” There are “world-leading universities and research institutes and, what is more, access to higher education is free.” However, although Europe continues “to be at the forefront of many of the technologies that will shape our future”, this is not enough to “make Europe the ideal place for innovative businesses to be founded, scale up and become leaders”. For this reason, von der Leyen has proposed a strategy based on three priorities.
The first is to “make full use of the scale of our single market.” The EU single market comprises “450 million people”, yet “our innovators are unable to fully exploit its potential” because “an entrepreneur wishing to expand across Europe still faces a maze of different rules and requirements”, with “27 legal systems and over 60 different types of national company forms”, the President said. The European Commission intends to turn this situation around through “EU Inc.”, the so-called “28th regime”. This is “a single, simplified company model, valid throughout Europe” which “enables entrepreneurs to set up a company entirely online, from anywhere in Europe, within 48 hours and for less than 100 euros”, the President explained, thereby facilitating “the start-up, development and expansion of businesses within the European Union.” This is an ambition for which the Berlaymont Building is “fighting hard, with Parliament and the Council, to ensure this ambition remains intact,” the President added.
Another initiative focuses on scale-ups, that is, innovative companies that have moved beyond the initial phase of their development (the start-up), have validated their product or service on the market and have a scalable and repeatable business model. Von der Leyen reported that in Europe, such companies “raise, on average, 50 per cent less capital than their peers in San Francisco”. Consequently, “when they need hundreds of millions to expand, they are often forced to look across the Atlantic,” she noted. For this reason, the Commission has launched “a European ‘scale-up’ fund” bringing together “public and private investors to create the largest European fund dedicated to growing businesses.” And according to von der Leyen, “it works.” In just two months, the fund “has invested in eight companies, helping them to raise close to 5 billion euros.”
The second priority is “capitalising on the opportunity of the clean transition”, particularly after a year in which “we have witnessed the devastating impact of climate change: droughts, wildfires and floods” and in which “we have also experienced first-hand the cost of our dependence on imported fossil fuels,” the President explained. The President of the European Commission pointed out that this year, “since the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, imported fossil fuels cost Europe an additional 127 billion euros without a single molecule of energy in addition.” Therefore, “when we import oil and gas, we risk importing the shocks and crises that come with them”, she stated, stressing that the green transition “is on one hand protecting our climate. But it is also about Europe’s competitiveness and independence.”
However, the direction seems clear to the President: “We will become the first climate-neutral continent by 2050,” she said, explaining that “we have taken a crucial step towards this goal by agreeing on the 2040 climate target”, with a commitment “to reduce Europe’s emissions by 90 per cent” by that year. Von der Leyen also provided another figure: “Since 2021, over 1.2 trillion euros have been invested in sustainable activities in the European Union”. Although “the global market for clean technologies is growing by around 20 per cent every year”, “our task is to ensure that these technologies are not only used in Europe, but also developed and manufactured here.” For example, thanks to the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS), emissions “have fallen by around 50 per cent, while the economy has grown by 30 per cent” and it has generated “over 270 billion euros in revenue to reinvest in innovation and the clean technologies of the future.” However, this instrument requires further support: “We aim to mobilise 100 billion euros to support industrial transformation,” the head of the European Commission said.
The third and final priority concerns “the use of artificial intelligence to generate benefits across all our economies”. The aim is to “put AI at the service of the real economy”. After highlighting the progress made in the industrial and healthcare sectors, von der Leyen stressed the need to “combine Europe’s strengths with the transformative power of artificial intelligence”. The head of the Berlaymont Building recalled that at the start of the year she had “appointed Jim Snabe as Special Envoy for Artificial Intelligence in Industry” and explained that, thanks to his work, “self-driving vehicles could reduce accidents involving pedestrians by over 90 per cent”.
At the end of her speech, Von der Leyen argued that Europe must be the “place where such vehicles are designed and built, not just where they are used”. For this reason, “we must give our innovators the conditions for success.” This means “faster and simpler approval for autonomous vehicles” and enabling companies to “access a single approval process And once a technology is approved, companies should be able to deploy it across Europe without any additional barrier.” This way, “our innovators can develop for a truly European market from day one on,” she concluded.
English version by the Translation Service of Withub
