EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboards 2011

This year, the top R&D investor is the Swiss company Roche (€7.18) which hasrisen 17 positions in the R&D ranking since 2004. The biggest R&D investingEU firm is Volkswagen (€6.26 bn) in 6 th position. There are five US companiesin the top 10, Pfizer (€7.02), Microsoft (€6.74 bn), Merck US (€6.40 bn), GeneralMotors (€5.19 bn) and Johnson & Johnson (€5.10 bn). The other companies inthe top 10 are Toyota (€6.67 bn) from Japan, Samsung (€6.18 bn) from SouthKorea and Novartis (€6.02 bn) from Switzerland.The top 50 companies invested €193.71 billion, accounting for 42.5% of thetotal R&D investment by the Scoreboard companies, compared to 32.6%accounted for in 2004 14 . The EU has 15 companies among the top 50 R&Dinvestors, one company less than in the 2010 Scoreboard (Finmeccanica). TheUS has 18 companies, one less compared to last year (Motorola). Japan has13 companies, one more than in last year’s Scoreboard (Fujitsu).Thirty eight companies in the top 50 have shown positive R&D investmentgrowth. Among them 16 companies had double digit R&D growth of which 12companies showed also double digit growth in net sales.Most of the companies with the largest increases in the top 50 are from thepharmaceuticals and ICT sectors: Merck US (47%), Abbot (35.7%), Pfizer(21.4%)), LG (39.5%), Oracle (38.9%), Google (32.3%), Samsung (24.9%).Also some companies from the automobiles sector had remarkable results:Daimler (16.5%), General Motors (14.7%) and BMW (13.3%).Other companies with R&D investment more than €1bn (beyond the top 50)have shown impressive R&D and net sales growth: China RailwaysConstruction (81.9%), Research In Motion, Canada (40%), Amazon.com(36.4%), Caterpillar (34.1%) and Apple (26.9%).Eighteen companies in the top 50 have experienced a decrease in R&Dinvestment. Among these, nine companies reduced R&D by more than 10%. Allthe companies that had a double digit drop in R&D are from Japan, mainly fromthe pharmaceuticals, automobiles and ICT sectors, e.g. Takeda Pharmaceutical(-34.6%), NEC (-20.4%), Toyota (-19.8%), Honda (-17.7%), Nissan (-15.4%).Again, most of these decreases reflect the drop in R&D budgets in 2009The R&D intensity of companies in the top 50 has decreased slightly due to thehigher rate of increase of net sales (4.8%) than that of R&D investment (3.1%).The EU companies in the top 50 have a slightly lower average R&D intensity(7.6%) than that from the non-EU (7.0%).The EU companies in the top 50 are mainly from the Automobile & Parts (5),Pharmaceuticals (4) and ICT-related sectors (4), whereas the non-EUcompanies are mainly from IT-related (17), Pharmaceuticals and Biotechnology(10), and Automobile & Parts sectors (6).14The 2004 Scoreboard however contained fewer companies.18The 2011 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard