The 2020 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard

The main objective of the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard (the Scoreboard) is to benchmark the performance of EU innovation-driven industries against main global counterparts. The 2020 edition of the Scoreboard analyses the 2500 companies investing the largest sums in R&D in the world in 2019. These companies, with headquarters in 43 countries and more than 800k subsidiaries all over the world, each invested over €34.7 million in R&D for a total of €904.2 billion. A main difference in the presentation of data in this Scoreboard edition regards the new composition of the EU following the departure of the UK on 31 January 2020. Henceforth, in this report, the EU is understood as EU27 (i.e. without the UK) and whenever the UK is included for comparative purposes, it will refer to EU28. The 2020 Scoreboard total R&D is equivalent to approximately 90% of the world’s business-funded R&D. The sample includes 421 companies based in the EU27, accounting for 20.9% of the total R&D in the sample, 775 US companies (38.5%), 309 Japanese companies (12.7%), 536 Chinese (13.1%) and 459 from the rest of the world (14.8%).This report analyses companies' R&D and economic indicators over the past years, focussing on the comparative performance of EU companies with respect to their global counterparts. In 2019, global corporate R&D continued to increase substantially, following the trends of the past years, despite a slowdown in companies’ sales and a decline in profits. This is the tenth consecutive year of R&D increases driven by R&D investments in ICT, Health and Automotive industries. Companies based in the EU27 increased significantly R&D (5.6%) but well below the US (10.8%) and Chinese companies (21%) rates. The impact of the covid-19 crisis is not yet reflected in this edition (2019 data), however, experience demonstrates the important role that R&D plays to tackle major socio-economic issues and to underpin the recovery. Indeed, past Scoreboard editions showed that companies sustaining or increasing R&D investment during previous crisis emerged with greatly improved competitive position in the upturn following the crisis. The Scoreboard results stress the need to step-up the implementation of EU policies aimed at supporting industrial R&D and innovation, especially to support the recovery of the covid-19 crisis and the industrial digital and green transitions.