Europe must reduce dual-use fragmentation to retain market share, says EU paper

Europe must produce more dual-use technologies and develop a 'common brand' for defence and security products to maintain global market share, according to a new EU policy paper.

"The current fragmented market weakens the competitiveness of Europe's security industry," said Antonio Tajani, European Commissioner for industry policy, during the paper's launch on 30 July.

The lack of an identifiable brand in the security and related sectors "is especially critical as the future key markets for security technologies will not be in Europe but in emerging countries," he added.

The paper is entitled 'Action Plan for an innovative and competitive Security Industry', and estimates that the EU's security market currently employs around 180,000 and is worth as much as EUR36.5 billion (USD57.2 billion): about 25 per cent of the world market.

However, the EU's security sector is highly fragmented, suffering from too many firewalls that separate defence research and development (R&D) from that of homeland security, it adds. Without action, the paper predicts that the EU's share of the global market will slump to 20 per cent by 2020.