> aerospace

Airbus is absolutely crushing Boeing in terms of quality. Granted, we are woefully behind on the 'space' part of aerospace.

> energy

CERN is anchored to the EU. ITER is anchored to the EU. We are world leaders in wind energy.

> telecom

Except for everyone in the West scrambling to replace Huawei with Ericsson tech.

> drugs / biotech

BioNtech made the first breakthrough on a COVID vaccine.

The EU has many issues, but losing leadership in the sectors you mentioned is not one of them.

> Airbus is absolutely crushing Boeing in terms of quality. Granted, we are woefully behind on the 'space' part of aerospace

Such a hyperbole statement.

Airbus has the edge in the narrowbody aircraft market, especially A321, while Boeing is plagued by 737 MAX problem.

OTOH Airbus is well behind Boeing in the widebody segment. Boeing had 1,464 787 orders as of Aug 2019, 882 of those had been delivered. Airbus had only sold 913 A350. A380 has been discontinued while Boeing can still count on B748 freighter.

Of course 2020 threw a wrench to the airline industry and it remains to be seen how well it will recover post pandemic. Both Airbus and Boeing are affected deeply.

You conveniently forgot the a330 which is Airbus' most successful widebody.

You are right that for now, Boeing is better in widebodies. But let's see Boeing new aircraft program, because currently Airbus is better prepared for the future.

> Granted, we are woefully behind on the 'space' part of aerospace.

Well, SpaceX caught with the pants down to everyone. Before the revolution of the reusable Falcon 9, the Ariane 5 was a fine reliable rocket.

Sadly, the Ariane 6 design predates the reusable revolution of SpaceX, how ever they are working on reusable Arianes that are similar to the Falcon 9 and Spaceship (https://www.techforspace.com/european-space-sector/european-...).

> Except for everyone in the West scrambling to replace Huawei with Ericsson tech.

That's entirely political and nothing to do with the tech. Huawei's tech is arguably better, cheaper (and available now).

How much of Huawei's research is done in EU? They have at least three research facilities in Sweden alone. Ericsson does a lot of research in the US. All of these companies are global, so to assign their research to only the country where they're headquartered gets a bit nonsensical.

Huawei’s tech is better per $ because they skipped years of R&D that they didn’t have to price in. I remember when their products included Cisco manuals.

It is cheaper since the chinede spy agencies sponsor it.

If you knew that important people would use your phones you could as well give them for free - easier to spy on them.

What, apart from using, does CERN have to do with energy?

> CERN is anchored to the EU. ITER is anchored to the EU.

Anchored, yeah sure. So you're listing something that isn't in the EU, which is revealing. ITER is entirely irrelevant. It's a pork project that won't result in much. The biggest breakthroughs in fusion will derive from smaller projects, not giant slow-moving projects like ITER. The next 20-30 years of energy generation is wind, natural gas, oil, solar, some hydrogen and nuclear (and primarily only China is brave enough to build that). Fusion will make zero contribution in that time.

> BioNtech made the first breakthrough on a COVID vaccine.

Moderna was just as well positioned as BioNtech, you're more than reaching. Russia and China also have apparently successful vaccines being deployed.

> The EU has many issues, but losing leadership in the sectors you mentioned is not one of them.

That's true in the sense that the EU never had leadership in most fields to begin with.

Fusion research needs a lot of money and resources. I honestly doubt it can be done by a startup. Nuclear fission was done by very well funded military research. It is true that China has licensed basically every nuclear design, but France is still a leader in nuclear fission.

I believe that if startups can keep losing billions each year and go public without ever running a profit, then startups may just as well be able to create a fusion power plant.

> Anchored, yeah sure. So you're listing something that isn't in the EU, which is revealing

It is surrounded by EU countries, in a country that is a pseudo-EU member. You're reaching.

> ITER is entirely irrelevant. It's a pork project that won't result in much.

Unless you have a seer's eye, these kinds of claims are baseless.

> The next 20-30 years of energy generation is wind, natural gas, oil, solar, some hydrogen and nuclear (and primarily only China is brave enough to build that)

Agreed and a sad state of affairs

> Moderna was just as well positioned as BioNtech

Which makes Moderna a leader too? It doesn't diminish BioNtech's work.

> That's true in the sense that the EU never had leadership in most fields to begin with.

You literally had to ignore multiple points in my parent comment to even be able to make this claim. Revealing..

Edit: not to mention we are commenting under an article that partly concerns ASML..

What did I just wrote about leadership and it's importance?

One might wonder if the EU has leadership capacity to be able to maintain domestic strategically important industries.

Generalising from 40 years of EU history, I have little confidence. The top US and East Asian processor and semiconductor companies all are extremely successful in the marketplace, in addition to consuming government subsidies. Fostering a competitive market has not been the EU's forte. Indeed the EU narrates this funding as a need to address a "market failure" [1]. I feel that this is one-dimensional, bur entirely predictable from the structure of EU decision making.

Just today, at midnight, the EU lost ARM and DeepMind as domestic industries.

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52...

I know nVidia bought Arm, but what is about DeepMind being lost as domestic industry?

It raises to prominence after becoming a Google wholly owned subdiary. I have repeated multiple times in other comments that DeepMind's success is at least built on top of Google's tech and capital.

Interesringly, Google's tech infrastructure were blueprinted by a lot of pioneers and two of the most well known are Urs Hozle and Luiz André Barroso both are of Eu descentdent.

There is no evidence that whatever DeepMind did can be done with another EU partner. Or even anyone who is not Google, largely thanks to Larry and Sergey's personal tastes and experience. I doubt Msft or Amazon have the right culture for DeepMind.

The whole alphabet thing was engineered to allow independency. So that, among other things, a more pure research org can work without the ever encroaching of the profit driven hands inside Google. Mind you, DeepMind absolutely put itself above Google, or at least firmly distance itself from Google, GCP once proposed to use DeepMind brand in marketing materials, and was sharply rejected citing "conflicting brand images".

I assume, they meant the UK finally fully leaving the EU this year rather than the sale to Nvidia

Right. So if the Nvidia deal succeeds ARM will be US American.

I have no idea whether any of the relevant antitrust official could still stop it.

Leadership or "leadership"? EU is full of "leaders", those that self-titled as such.

It lacks motivation, there is no SV in Europe because one cannot pay competitively with SV for top talent when you tax to death. It is a lot easier to become a billionaire from real stuff (not manipulating stock markets or other financial trickeries) in US than in EU, so the smart and motivated in EU move to US; what is left is ... what is left: either less motivated or less smart or less both.

The parent is alluding to the notion that govt investment made for sluggish state owned industries which aim to be second and suck the life out of any domestic competition.

There are a variety of ways to cultivate a domestic industry, govt committees directly investing doesn’t seem like the leading candidate can. Trade barriers and state sponsored industrial partnerships.