Welcome to the European Parliamentary Research Service podcasts. In this podcast, we'll talk about how to

ensure greater strategic autonomy for the European industry. We'll analyze its weaknesses and

strengths in the light of new geopolitical challenges and look at EU responses. Stay with us.

Achieving Europe's twin green and digital transitions requires a strong, innovative and more autonomous industrial sector. And while European

industry has many strengths, it is, for instance, a global green tech leader. It also has weaknesses.

It is highly dependent on critical raw materials from third countries. It's lagged behind in strategic

sectors like batteries, and it suffers from insufficient research and development funding, market fragmentation and lack of skills.

So, boosting the strategic autonomy of EU industry means addressing all these issues

and reducing dependencies from third countries.

That's right, but COVID-19 has shown us just how interdependent and vulnerable

our economies and supply chains are. Another pandemic,

a natural disaster or political crisis such as the war in Ukraine, may disrupt entire global

value chains again. So a mix of domestic and external policy actions will be necessary

to secure more autonomy.

It's against this background that in March 2020, the European Commission adopted a new industrial strategy to make EU industry more competitive globally and to reinforce its industrial

and strategic autonomy. The strategy was reviewed in May 2021 to factor in the impacts of the pandemic,

but securing and diversifying supply of critical raw materials remains one of the top priorities.

Here's Commissioner Maros Shevkovich.

We need to ensure a secure and sustainable supply of raw materials to meet the needs of clean and

digital technologies, including in health sector and space and defense industries. And we have to

avoid them competing with each other for finite resources. To achieve this, the European

Commission identified over 130 products and raw materials used in sensitive ecosystems on which the EU is highly dependent, mainly in energy-intensive and health sectors.

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