EU R&D Investment Scoreboard published

The European Commission has published its 2013 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard. The scoreboard is based on a sample of 2,000 companies, the world’s top investors in R&D. They represent more than 90% of the total expenditure on R&D by businesses worldwide. Leading world R&D investors have continued to increase their R&D investments by 6.2% in 2012, a figure above their net sales growth (4.2%).

Out of the companies gathered in the scoreboard, 527 are based in the EU. These companies invested €158bn in 2012, equivalent to 29.3% of the overall investment in R&D by the Scoreboard companies. The 527 EU companies increased R&D investment and net sales by 6.3 % and 4.3 % respectively. The 658 US companies reported a higher increase in R&D (8.2%) but net sales grew only by 2.9 %, compared with a strong increase in 2011.

Companies based in the ten top R&D investing member states account for 97.3% of the total R&D of the Top 1000 EU companies (these all have R&D investments exceeding €5.2m). Those based in Germany, the top R&D investor, continued the good performance shown in the past year, increasing R&D in 2012 well above the top 2000 world R&D investors’ average, at 11.6 %. Companies based in the UK and France showed a poor performance, increasing R&D by 0.5% and 2.3% respectively.

The top three companies on the scoreboard were all based in Germany. Volkswagen invested €9.52bn in 2012. Daimler invested €5.64bn, whilst Robert Bosch invested €4.92bn.