National Information Centre for European Research
The European Union‘s Framework Programmes for research and innovation are not among the biggest players in the world context. The largest industrial corporations have much higher R&D expenditures.
Participants in Horizon Europe calls, for which the deadline for submitting project proposals ended in 2021, reported an aggregate net EU contribution of €9.12 billion as of 26 April 2023. In comparison, 13 corporations listed in the 2022 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard had R&D spending in 2021 higher. Among them, the corporations based in the USA dominate – they were represented nine times (e.g. Alphabet, META, Microsoft, Apple, Intel). One each from China (Huawei), Republic of Korea (Samsung Electronics), Germany (Volkswagen) and Switzerland (Roche).
Another 25 corporations had R&D expenditures of more than €5 billion in 2021, i.e. higher than the Czech Republic's R&D expenditures in 2021. Eight of them were from the USA (e.g. General Motors, Ford Motor, Oracle, Abbvie, Cisco, IBM), also 8 from the EU (including 6 from Germany - e.g. Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Robert Bosch, Bayer, SAP, Siemens), 3 from Japan (Toyota Motor, Honda, NTT) and 3 from China (Alibaba, Tencent, China State Construction Engineering).
A further 161 corporations had an annual R&D expenditure of more than €1 billion. 62 of them were from the USA (e.g. Gilead, NVIDIA, Amgen, Raytheon, Tesla, Adobe), 31 from China (e.g. Baidu, Xiaomi, SAIC Motor) and 30 from the EU (including 8 from Germany – e.g. Boehringer Sohn, Continental, Merck DE, BASF – and 7 from France – e.g. Renault, Valeo, Schneider, Thales, L'Oréal).
The named American corporations focus mainly on IT (software and hardware), the pharmaceutical industry and biotechnology; German and French corporations operate mainly in engineering.
Summary: For Europe's largest corporations – German and French – contributions from the EU's Framework Programmes for research and innovation represent one of the items in their large budgets for research and development activities. A warning for the EU is the development R&D activities of Chinese corporations and their placement in the ranking of 2500 industrial corporations with the largest R&D expenditures.
Author: Vladimír Vojtěch, TC Prague, vojtech@tc.cz, 26.06.2023
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