Article: CETA Opportunities and Benefits for the EU ICT Industry

While innovative ICT solutions spring up like never before throughout Asia, CETA widens your internationalisation possibilities by providing access to an advanced ICT market in Canada. CETA provisional implementation is already facilitating access, reducing tariffs and providing more possibilities for European ICT companies to export and expand operations to Canada.

The Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) industry plays a major role in the transformation of production processes in a vast part of the global economy as it fosters automation, and most importantly, innovation.

Figure 1 Statistics Canada custom tables

In 2017, the EU ICT sector’s Value Added (VA) amounted to 642.7 billion euros[1]. The Canadian ICT Industry is much smaller but no less significant, at an estimated 48.6 billion euros in 2016.[2] With approximately 39,000 companies, the Canadian ICT sector is largely occupied by SMEs (over 87 percent), the majority of which fall within the software and computer services industries employing fewer than 10 people.[3] As a world leader in science, technology and innovation (ranked 14th in the Global Competitiveness Report 2017-18[4]), Canada offers vast business, research and investment opportunities for European ICT companies.

From 2013 to 2017 alone, European outbound ICT investments skyrocketed from just over 700 million euros to over 1.6 billion euros and increased its share of investments in Canada from 56 to 71 percent.[5] With CETA, the incentives for European ICT companies to invest in and trade with Canada are now even greater. There are several elements of CETA which already demonstrate a positive impact on European ICT business geared towards Canada, including:

  • Easier entry to service markets
  • Access to government procurement markets
  • Complete tariff elimination on manufacturing goods and IT products
  • Enhanced protection of intellectual property rights
  • Trade facilitation via increased governmental/institutional support
  • Mutual acceptance of the results of conformity assessment tests

Julien Trassard, CEO of LINKBYNET North America, a French subsidiary of Cloud computing-DevOps & Containerisation in Canada, said on tariffs: “Another important aspect of CETA is tariffs reductions, which has benefited us in several cases, especially for the technical equipment that we needed for our clients.”

CETA is building a strong and competitive shared environment for ICT development and use. Canada and the EU are currently implementing a combination of policies, including a strong and flexible series of IP rights laws and a regime of interoperable data-protection to allow functional exchange of data and information between the regions’ information systems[6]. These policies aim to encourage and foster digital, scientific and technological innovation while also protecting privacy. This means that the increasing exchange of information and knowledge between European and Canadian companies becomes not just easier, but also safer.

Whether you are a company working in cybersecurity, quantum computing, new media services or data management, with CETA you can rely on greater predictability, transparency and protection systems – all of which support EU business to invest in and collaborate with Canadian companies.

European companies and reserachers in search for public funding possibilities can look into the collaborative research & innovation projects offered by the Horizon 2020 of the European Commission, as well as the global research funding offered by the Canadian Government.

For upcoming IT & technology trade shows in Canada, please click here.

 

[1] European Commission, EU Science Hub, 2018 PREDICT dataset (2018): https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/predict/ict-sector-analysis-2018/data-metadata

[2] Canadian ICT Sector Profile (2017): www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/ict-tic.nsf/eng/home

[3] JRC – Dir. B calculations and estimates, based on EUROSTAT data, PREDICT project

[4] Global Competitiveness Report 2017-2018, World Economic Forum www3.weforum.org/docs/GCR2017-2018/05FullReport/TheGlobalCompetitivenessReport2017%E2%80%932018.pdf 

[5] Canadian Venture Capital (2017): www.cvca.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Q4-2017_Canada-Report-ENG_Final.pdf

[6] European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) https://edps.europa.eu/data-protection/our-work/subjects/interoperability_en

The CETA Market Access Program for EU Business is an EU-funded project to help European companies to fully benefit from free trade agreement between the EU and Canada. The Program collaborates with the European Union Chamber of Commerce in Canada, which hosts the Program’s webpage. For more information, please get in touch with the Program Team via e-mail at:  ceta.market.access@development-solutions.eu.