EU R&D scoreboard : the 2014 EU industrial R&D investment scoreboard

The 2014 "EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard" (the Scoreboard) contains economic and financial data for the world's top 2500 companies ranked by their investments in Research and Development (R&D). The sample contains 633 companies based in the EU and 1867 companies based elsewhere. The Scoreboard data are drawn from the latest available companies' accounts, i.e. usually the fiscal year 2013/14. Key findings of the 2014 Scoreboard comprise: The world top 2500 R&D investors continued to increase their investment in R&D (4.9%), well above the growth of net sales (2.8%). The 633 EU companies increased R&D by 2.6% and decreased sales by 2.0%. Volkswagen leads the global ranking for the second consecutive year, showing again a remarkable increase of R&D (23.4%, up to €11.7bn). Second continues to be Samsung, showing also an impressive R&D increase of 25.4%. EU companies in the automobile sector, accounting for one quarter of the total EU's R&D, continued to increase significantly their R&D (6.2%). This reflects the good performance of automobiles companies based in Germany (9.7%) that account for three quarters of this sector's R&D in the EU. The poor R&D performance of EU companies in high-tech sectors such as Pharmaceuticals (0.9%) and Technology Hardware and equipment (-5.4%) weighed down the total R&D increase of the EU sample. The overall amount invested in R&D by EU companies in high-tech sectors represents 40% of the amount invested by their US counterparts and the gap between the two company samples is increasing with time.