The Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking (FCH JU) of the European Commission has selected the project FCH2RAIL to start negotiations for an EU grant agreement valued at 10 million EUR. FCH2RAIL would be technically led by CAF and would benefit from the European funding under the H2020 Program to work on the development of a railway vehicle prototype powered by hydrogen.
Today, the EC worsened its forecasts on the Spanish economy’s performance. It now expects a slump in GDP at the end of 2020 of 12.4%, compared to the 10.9% estimated a few months ago. This is the most severe decline in the entire European Union. Spain will be the only country in the region with an over 10% drop in its economy this year. The Spanish government warns that these macro forecasts “have become outdated”,as they have not collected data on 3Q GDP, which is much better than expected.
Gemma Garcia Brosa via The Conversation | On October 7, Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez presented the government’s Plan for Recovery, Transformation and Resilience to access the resources of the European programme Next Generation EU and stated that 800,000 jobs will be created. The Spanish economy is undoubtedly capable of generating that number of jobs within three years. In fact, on average, more than 400,000 jobs have been created in Spain each year in 2014-2019. But does this target seem realistic now?
The airline had requested help a few months ago and today the Spanish cabinet has authorised its rescue, the first one involving a private company in Spain during the coronavirus crisis. The State will inject 475 million euros to avoid Air Europa’s bankruptcy via a specific fund created to save companies with solvency problems, particularly affected by Covid-19. This aid will mean a support of 240 million euros via a participative loan and another 235 million through an ordinary credit.
According to the FDI Markets database (produced by the Financial Times Group), in 2020 Spain was the fourth largest European receiver of greenfield projects, ICEX Agency reported. During this period, a total of 313 foreign capital greenfield projects have been carried out in Spain. While this is 42 percent down on last year, the fall at global level has been higher still. This has enabled Spain to reach the fourth position, which is an improvement on previous years: in 2019, it was in fifth place, and in 2018, seventh.
Telefónica and Allianz have reached an agreement for the creation of a joint venture to deploy Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) in Germany.Both companies will each hold 50% under a co-control governance model. It will be an independent open-access wholesale operator focused on deploying fibre in rural and semi-rural areas of Germany to tap the potential of Europe’s largest broadband market.
Javier Garcia-Arenas (CaixaBank Research ) | The pension reform currently being prepared in Spain is a hot and pressing issue. After all, the structural deficit of the Social Security system (around 18 billion euros) and the need to ensure the system’s long-term sustainability in the face of demographic ageing are inescapable challenges for our economy. In this context, the minister for Inclusion, Social Security and Migration, José Luis Escrivá, has announced that he intends to boost workplace pension schemes (also known as company pension) in order to encourage long-term saving, as well as indicating that the British model could serve as a good example to follow.
Sacyr’s selling its construction subsidiaries in Angola, Mozambique and Cape Verde is part of firm’s strategy to reduce the risk of building in non-strategic markets and to focus on concessions in its key markets. This activity already accounts for nearly 80% of the group’s EBITDA. According to analysts at Alphavalue, Sacyr, with a capitalization of just around €800 M, has been “the most resilient” company in the concessions’ sector during the confinement thanks to the type of contracs it has signed.
The Eurozone economy grew by record high of 12.7% in the third quarter with expansion including the four major countries: Germany by 8.2%, France by 18.2%, Italy by 16.1% and Spain by 16.7%. This rebound reflected the largest increase since statistics started being kept in 1995. Specifically, Spanish historical GDP’s followed a plunge of almost 18% in the previous three months. However, these figures has a sort of bittersweet taste as they coincide with the reintroduction of strict containment measures across the region which are likely to make the expected recovery reverse.
Intermoney | The Spanish government’s collection capacity, given that the basic economic scenario is likely to be worse than it has projected, must be questioned. In fact, even taking into account the tax hikes included in the 2021 budget bill, we estimate tax revenues will be around 211 billion euros in 2021. So almost 11 billion euros below budget and this would be equivalent to just under 1% of next year’s GDP. This figure does not include the capacity to fight tax fraud, which is expected to generate 828 million euros.