President von der Leyen opens the EU Industry Days: “let’s accelerate the recovery and make Europe more competitive in the world”

President Ursula von der Leyen opened today the EU Industry Days 2021 delivering a speech in which she praised the European industry its resilience amidst the coronavirus pandemic, while highlighting that we needed to draw the lessons from the crisis. President von der Leyen said: “The pandemic has led to an unprecedented disruption of our Single Market. This should never happen again. This is why we are working on a Single Market Emergency Instrument. It will ensure the free movement of goods, services and people, with greater transparency and coordination.” The President also addressed some of the challenges ahead for the industrial sector: “Another lesson we have learnt is our dependency on certain raw materials sourced from only a handful of producers. Green and digital technologies currently depend on a number of scarce raw materials. We must diversify our supply chains. This is the goal of our Action Plan on Critical Raw Materials. And this is why we have proposed to create a European Raw Materials Alliance.” Finally, she referred to the successful public-private cooperation of the last year, saying: “In these months, as we fought the virus, we have explored new ways of working with European industries. I believe we should move from crisis mode to a new cruising speed of cooperation with European industries. Building new and agile alliances where the public sector joins forces with industry. Our Battery Alliance makes for a very good example. I want Europe to invest in this approach – building new alliances and partnerships with the private sector.” The full speech of President von der Leyen is available here and the video can be watched again here.