EU companies' R&D investment grows faster than global and US trends

9 December 2016

The 2016 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard, published by the European Commission, shows that EU companies invested 188.3 billion euros ($198.5 billion) in research and development (R&D) in the fiscal year 2015/2016. This constitutes an annual increase of 7.5% which puts EU companies ahead of the global (6.6%) and US (5.9%) trends.

Global industrial R&D investment reached 696 billion euros worldwide, with sectors such as software, IT, pharmaceuticals and automobiles fostering R&D investments and sales. Overall sales, however, declined 3.6% worldwide, mostly due to the performance of low-tech sectors, particularly oil and mining, which suffered from low commodity prices.

Thirty EU companies are among the world's top 100 R&D investors, mainly in the fields of automobiles, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, ICT, and aerospace and defence. The top investors are based in Germany (69.8 billion euros), France (28.5 billon euros), the UK (28.2 billion euros) and the Netherlands (14.1 billion euros).

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