In this DLD Munich session, Sven Smit, Chairman and Director of the McKinsey Global Institute, addresses Europe’s challenges in energy and technology dependence.
“We went gone global, which is a good thing”, Smit says. “We get resources from the world. We get specialization, we get scale effects, we get all kinds of beautiful things.”
But Europe also made itself too dependent on a limited number of countries, he argues.
“We take all the gas from Russia and nowhere else. And we do that with many other things. We take the palladium from Russia, we take the lithium from Chile.”
To better protect itself, Smit says, Europe needs to reduce its dependence on other countries, particularly when it comes to core technologies.
“We’ve lost our strategic autonomy in food, energy, and some basic materials. We should not lose our strategic autonomy in tech, and science-based technologies”, Smit demands.
Europe has a lot to show for, the McKinsey analyst concludes, but it needs to create more companies that can compete “at scale” with other global giants.
