Emisores| European companies have steadily lost positions in the Fortune Global 500 stock index over the last twenty years and now represent only 15.5% of its components, compared to 31.8% for the United States and 27.5% for China, according to the biannual report An ice-bath for EU leaders. Competitiveness is crumbling: Europe’s business case needs a rebuild drawn up by the European Roundtable for Industry (ERT), an organisation that brings together 40 of Europe’s largest companies, including Telefónica, Inditex and Iberdrola.
The “probable causes” of this decline are, according to the report, the lack of competitiveness in business models, missed opportunities in new high-income sectors and that “the EU is no longer an environment that fosters strong companies”.
The report notes that EU companies are in a worse position than their US peers because “raising capital is easier in the US, where capital markets are much deeper than in the EU”, where these “remain fragmented and less developed”, determining that “US companies can build scale in a large domestic market, while the EU Single Market is not fully integrated.”
