EU companies increase their R&D investments
Tekes / Jari Hytti The pharmaceuticals & biotechnology sector reinforces its position as top R&D investor worldwide.The R&D investment growth of companies headquartered in the European Union increased by 8.1 per cent in 2008. The global increase was 6.9 per cent. Over two subsequent years the growth has been clearly faster within the EU than in the USA and Japan.
Two EU companies, Volkswagen and Nokia, were among the top 10 R&D investors. Volkswagen was in the third place with an R&D investment of nearly 6 billion Euros while Nokia ranked eight with its over 5 billion Euro investment. The information was published in the 2009 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard.
Companies based in emerging economies continued to show the highest R&D growth, led by China with a 40 per cent increase, and followed by India with 27.3 per cent, Taiwan 25.1 per cent and Brazil with 18.6 per cent increase. The world's biggest investor in R&D in 2008 was Japanese Toyota Motor, with 7.61 billion Euro R&D investment.
The EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard provides information on the top 1000 EU companies and 1000 non-EU companies investing in R&D during the year. It is published annually by the European Commission. The Scoreboard and other Industrial Research Investment Monitoring and Analysis reports are downloadable at http://iri.jrc.ec.europa.eu/
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