On 6 May, Marek Przeor from DG GROW presented the update of the EU Industrial Strategy in the morning session of the European Alliance Against Coronavirus.

The industrial strategy builds on the one published on 10 May 2020 and takes into account the impact of the coronavirus crisis, which let to a 6.3% decline of the EU economy, and the lessons learned from the crisis. The update has furthermore the aim to sustain investments, tackle strategic dependencies, and accelerate the green and digital transition.

The first lesson learnt is the need to increase the resilience of the single market. The new Single Market Emergency Instrument should suggest structural solutions to facilitate the circulation of goods and services, improve transparency on export and services restrictions, and enable faster production availability.

Furthermore, the update of the industrial strategy addresses the second lesson learnt – the European dependencies on foreign suppliers. The strategy foresees a periodic review of those dependencies and want to provide specific support to increase the resilience of SMEs, and to explore stronger partnerships and industrial alliances.

 The third lesson highlights the need to accelerate the green and digital transition and to put the SMEs at the heart of this transition. For this, the EU plans several programmes and actions for investments and capacity building, innovation, skills, and access to materials, data, and energy.

The discussion after the presentation showed that we need a transversal approach of the activities to connect the different ecosystems.

The morning sessions are open to everyone.

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Watch the recording from the session here: