ZVEI IAA Position: Resilience as a Business Case

Pressure on European industry is growing as global market shares shift. At the same time, key stages of value creation are increasingly moving outside Europe. The European Union is responding to these developments with the Industrial Accelerator Act (IAA), which is intended to strengthen Europe’s economic resilience and strategic capacity to act. Its success will depend largely on how the IAA is designed in practice. The objective must be to create competitive framework conditions, remove barriers and incentivise investment.

From public procurement and funding to better investment conditions, the IAA addresses important levers. However, for the IAA to tangibly accelerate industrial resilience, decarbonisation and economic security, it must form part of a comprehensive strategy for Europe as an industrial location. ZVEI sees a particular need for improvement in the following areas:

• Best value rather than lowest price: Public procurement and funding must focus on economic value across the entire life cycle.

• Open to additional key technologies: The IAA must provide for a binding assessment of whether further strategic industrial sectors and technologies should be included.

• Simple and digital implementation: An IAA Compliance Calculator should ensure the consistent application of origin, component and equivalence requirements.

• Establish a reliable “Made with Europe” approach: A transparent opt-in procedure should include trading partners that offer reciprocity and restrict limitations to narrowly defined, well-justified exceptional cases.

The ZVEI position paper “IAA: Resilience as a Business Case” distils the proposals of the electrical and digital industry and sets out in detail what must now be done to effectively promote investment, resilience and competitiveness