Orgalim at the European Commission’s EU Trade Policy Day: driving competitiveness from the inside
Thursday 20 November: Orgalim President Javier Ormazabal spoke on a panel for the European Commission's EU Trade Policy Day 2025 on 'Powering EU industry: Driving external competitiveness from the inside.'
Alongside Leopoldo Rubinacci, Deputy Director-General for Trade at Economic Security at the European Commission and following a keynote speech by Enrico Letta, former Prime Minister of Italy, he stressed that Europe's industrial technology sector has now seen its third year of decline.
Orgalim represents Europe’s technology industries, comprised of 770,000 innovative companies spanning the mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, electronics, ICT and metal technology branches. Together they represent the EU’s largest manufacturing sector, generating annual turnover of over €2,755 billion and providing 11.6 million direct jobs.
Despite operating under significant economic pressure, Orgalim’s industries are still highly competitive. They are greatly anticipating the EU’s new Free Trade Agreements and improved market access, but this competitiveness is under severe threat from excessive regulatory burden domestically. European measures such as CBAM and the new steel safeguards add extreme costs onto the downstream sectors, undermining a full-value-chain approach.
Domestic EU policy is not making things any easier for us. Legislation like CBAM and the new trade measure to address steel overcapacity, mean Europe's manufacturing industries will face massive increases in their costs, hurting our customers and our competitiveness."
The huge spike in uncertainty and volatility in the international landscape is clearly a major factor in explaining this downturn.
The United States is the European Union's most important export market, where we face prohibitive 50% tariffs on the metal content of hundreds of machinery and electrical equipment products. In addition, over the past few months, our industries faced huge supply disruptions due to China’s export restrictions for rare earths, which are a critical input for manufacturing essential technologies such as batteries, electric motors, generators, and so on.
Also on the panel were Henrik Andersen, Group President and CEO of Vestas Wind Systems; Antonio Marcegaglia, President and CEO of Marcegaglia Steel; and Judith Kirton-Darling, Secretary General for industriAll Europe.