Brussels must present Tuesday an ambitious plan to strengthen the productive capacities of the old continent in electronic chips, an essential component in many industrial sectors.
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Little by little, brick brick, the Europeans try to decline this concept of European sovereignty they have made their, but which remains to be built. Tuesday, February 8, the Commission must submit a legislative proposal on semiconductors, the future of which will measure the path traveled by the twenty-seven on the subject of industrial policy.
The objective of the text is to provide the old continent with the sufficient capacity to weigh on the global scale of this highly strategic sector, while electronic chips are now everywhere. They are found both in computers, smartphones, televisions, cars, aircraft, only in washing machines, air conditioners or solar panels. And with the digitalization of the economy, they will take more and more room.
Today, the European Union (EU) produces less than 10% of world semiconductors, compared with 40% thirty years ago. With globalization, she has divestive from this pan of the economy, for the benefit of the United States and even more from Asia. But the Pandemic of Covid-19 has exposed the boundaries of this model. The Europeans have violently realized that, overnight, their suppliers could stop serving them, as they have experienced at their depends on the masks in the spring of 2020. The shortages, in these times of exit of crisis, N ‘ have not helped reassure them. “For semiconductors, we depend at 80% of Asia and 60% Taiwan,” summarizes the French commissioner at the domestic market, Thierry Breton. “If Taiwan was no longer able to export, in three weeks, all the factories in the world would stop,” he continues.
Establish a balance of power with the rest of the world
In this context, the Commission wishes to protect the EU risks, geopolitical or other, which could stop its economy. It is not so much, in his eyes, to make it self-sufficient – “It would cost between 240 billion and 320 billion euros,” said the Commissioner of Competition, Danish Margrethe Vestacier, At the Financial Times on February 2 – that to give him a place in this crucial industry and the means to introduce a balance of power with the rest of the world.
Brussels has therefore concocted a plan that must allow Europeans to inject 42 billion euros of public investment in the semiconductor industry on their soil. “This public money will accompany private investment. In total, by 2030, between 90 billion and 100 billion euros that should be invested in semiconductors in Europe,” says a senior official.
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