EU companies increased their R&D spending slightly in the year to the start of August 2005 but still lag their global competitors.
The German car manufacturer DaimlerChrysler is now the biggest global investor in R&D, spending €5.7 billion last year, according to an EU R&D scorecard.
Just seven Irish companies make the top 700 EU list in the scorecard, with Elan ranked highest in 98th position with annual spending of €136 million last year.
The other Irish firms on the list are: Kerry Group, Iona Technologies, Trintech, Greencore, Waterford Wedgwood and Kingspan. However, four of those show significant drops in spending on R&D over the past year, with some suffering difficult trading conditions.
The scorecard, which is based on corporate information obtained from public firms, shows that, overall, EU firms invested 0.7 per cent more in R&D in the year to the start of August, compared to the same period 12 months earlier. This represents a turnaround from the 2004 scorecard, which showed that R&D investment fell 2 per cent.
However, spending on R&D by non-EU firms increased by 7 per cent last year, widening the gap in investment on R&D further between the EU and other regions such as the US and Japan.
The figures prompted EU Science and Research commissioner Janez Potocnik to warn yesterday that the situation was now serious for the EU. "We have some excellent performing EU companies, but we need greater coherence and ambition in establishing the right conditions for R&D and innovation among member states so that we have many more of them," he said.
The commission is targeting increased R&D spending as a key priority as part of its Lisbon Agenda programme, which aims to make Europe more competitive.
The scorecard shows that the top 10 Irish firms spent €296 million in the past year on R&D, a fall of 13.4 per cent on the previous performance in the scorecard. The Irish firms reported an R&D to sales ratio of 2.1 per cent. This compares with R&D to sales ratios of Belgium (4.6 per cent) Czech Republic (0.2 per cent) Denmark (9 per cent) France (3.8 per cent) Poland (0.3 per cent) and Britain (2 per cent).
Pfizer was the top spending non-EU company, notching up investment of €5.7 billion, slightly less than just a few hundred million below DaimlerChrysler.
