On 1 December 2016, the European Commission published the 2016 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard.
The Scoreboard which is published annually by the DG Research & Innovation and DG Joint Research Centre collects companies' key R&D and economic indicators. For the fiscal year 2015/2016, it shows that EU companies invested €188.3 billion in Research & Development (R&D), which is an annual increase of 7.5% putting EU companies ahead of the global (6.6%) and US (5.9%) trends.
Globally, industrial R&D investment reached €696 billion worldwide, with sectors such as software, IT, pharmaceuticals, and automobiles making the top of the list. Overall sales, however, declined 3.6% globally, which is associated with the performance of low-tech sectors, particularly oil and mining, which suffered from low commodity prices.
30 EU companies are among the world's top 100 R&D investors, mainly coming from the fields of automobiles, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, ICT, and aerospace and defence. The top investors come from Germany (€69.8 billion), France (€28.5 billion), the UK (€28.2 billion) and the Netherlands (€14.1 billion).
The Scoreboard is accompanied by a survey of the 1000 top R&D investors based in the EU. It highlights that R&D investments are expected to fall in the coming years in the automobiles and parts sector (-0.8%) while growth of 7 to 8% is expected in high-tech sectors, specifically in healthcare, pharmaceuticals and technology hardware.
The industrial R&D investment Scoreboard can be found here.
