Mediaroom

 The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre has recently released the 2021 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard. This yearly publication looks at the 2,500 companies investing the largest sums in R&D worldwide. The latest Scoreboard has listed, once again, the automotive sector as the biggest R&D investor in Europe, responsible for 33.6% of the total investments coming from private sector in 2020.  

Further, the EC Scoreboard points out that the R&D investments generated by the automotive sector, although having faced a global decrease of about 4% in 2020 compared to 2019, have doubled in Europe between 2011 and 2020, peaking at €62bn at the end of this period. 

This data is even more impressive when compared to other figures worldwide: almost 45% of the global R&D investments in the automotive and transport sectors are happening in Europe. Moreover, Europe’s sector keeps increasing its competitive advantage over other key markets. In 2011, EU companies were investing in automotive R&D twice as much as their US counterparts. This data has grown significantly, and in 2020 EU companies invested 3.2 times more than their counterparts in the US. The European auto sector has also strengthened its innovation leadership compared to China, reaching a level of R&D investment five times larger than the Chinese sector in 2020. 

Source: European Commission