What is the Low Carbon and Circular Economy Business Action in the Americas about?

Objective: Help European businesses gain market access for their green technologies and services in the Americas

 

• Concretely, the aim is to support with technical assistance more than 230 business concepts between European green tech SMEs and small mid-caps and their private or public counterparts in 6 American countries: Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile and Canada
• The ambition is that around 70% of them become contracts.

Why these countries?

• The EU has concluded free trade agreements (FTAs) with all of them.
• Therefore European companies will enjoy preferential tariff treatment. Also trade facilitation and rule-making in areas such as investment, intellectual property, government procurement, technical standards and sanitary and phytosanitary issues.

What is in this action for European businesses?

• EU represents around 1/5 of the global market for environmental goods and services. But having access to the American markets can be complicated.
• This action helps European businesses all along the way from finding a potential client to signing a contract and selling their technology on the ground. The action will map the demand in the target countries, mobilise potential clients, screen the best business matches, assess the potential for commercialisation of business concepts and offer technical assistance to ensure that the best business concepts reach commercialisation.
• Technical assistance can be technical feasibility studies, environmental assessments, impact assessment and cost-benefit analyses, financial viability modelling, legal advice, advice on intellectual property and other support required for the drafting and formalisation of the proposal resulting in a fully-fledged investment proposal.

Who can participate?

• European SMEs and small mid-caps that produce low carbon, resource efficient, circular economy technologies. Counterparts in America can be private or public and of all sizes.
• The role of European business networks is crucial to speed up the matching of companies. Clusters, for example, proved to be very effective identifying companies in the pilot action run in Mexico and Brazil.
• A very important lesson learned from the pilot project in Mexico and Brazil, in the pre-COVID context: the companies most likely to be successful entering these countries were consolidated companies with a minimum of 2 years of experience and final producers, not intermediaries.