Call for self-reliance European manufacturing industry grows stronger

With the corona crisis hitting many companies, the call to get fewer products from Asia is growing. Particularly on Twitter, there are calls to increase the self-reliance of European manufacturing.

Both the Netherlands and Belgium received hundreds of thousands of mouth caps from China last week. They all turned out to be unusable because they do not meet safety requirements. This is because they were made for industrial purposes and not for medical ones. The shortcoming prompted reactions on Twitter and elsewhere. Someone says: "It is high time to bring the manufacturing industry back to Europe." According to another, unusable mouth caps are the result if you put price above quality. There are calls for the Dutch manufacturing industry to roll up its sleeves and show that things can be done differently. "We will soon have to start thinking whether we should not design our economy differently so that we are less dependent on other countries," is also a reaction on the social platform.

This in-depth article by Reuters also examines the long-term vision that needs to be developed for manufacturing in Europe.

Exactly what impact the corona crisis will have on the Dutch (and European) manufacturing industry is still unclear to everyone. ING writes in its customised 'sector news' that in any case it will be all hands on deck, partly because many industrial companies in the Netherlands are highly internationalised. The corona crisis is causing delays in the supply of raw materials and semi-finished products. In particular, the electronics, machinery and automotive industries have to rely on inputs from China and South Korea, for instance. Suppliers from the Netherlands are also affected as demand from abroad decreases. This could possibly mean that we actually become more dependent on our own industry.