The EU elevates the heartbeat with China by vetoing the good public purchases of its sanitary materials | Economy | EUROtoday

The industrial warfare with the United States has not resolved the friction that the European Union has with the opposite nice world potential, China. The European Commission has determined to exclude public purchases from well being gadgets value greater than 5 million euros and, as well as, doesn’t help you have greater than half of Chinese merchandise in competitors affords. With this determination, introduced this Friday, Brussels premieres its worldwide public procurement instrument, a brand new instruments to defend group positions in a context of rising industrial warfare.
The European Union created within the final legislature a mechanism with which it intends to observe that there’s reciprocity in worldwide public procurement. That is, management that European corporations which are offered to competitions in third -country administrations have the identical therapy and situations as non -European corporations obtain within the EU. This permits the Commission, if after an investigation it concludes that it’s not so, reply with equal reprisals.
The device, as is the anticoration instrument, extra linked to commerce, is created above all in China, as a deterrence. And it has been exactly with China with the nation that has been launched, in a call that involves reveal that the method between the EU and the Asian large won’t be so simple as one would possibly assume in precept now that there’s an open industrial warfare with the United States.
Brussels has been warning of this because the president of the United States, Donald Trump, started to rise tariffs. Between the EU and China there are nonetheless many pending points of their industrial affairs in order that the deterioration of the transatlantic relationship would launch a mechanism of speaking vessels. The fundamental one, indisputably, is the overcapacity put in within the Asian large in lots of sectors: a component that threatens to flood sure sectors (electrical automobiles, photo voltaic panels …) of Chinese merchandise, drowning producers from different areas. And, as well as, that overcapacity would have been achieved primarily based on subsidies – within the case of the electrical automobile there was a European investigation that concluded it – that uneven competitors.
In the case of well being gadgets, the Commission opened an investigation in April 2024. “The evidence collected indicates that the Chinese Public Procurement Market of Health Products has been gradually closed for European companies and for products manufactured in the EU. This is due to the measures introduced by China that establish unfair differences between local and foreign companies, and between sanitary products of local production and imported,” justify the opening of the investigation.
The first conclusions arrived in January of this yr, when the indications that had led to open the file months earlier than had been confirmed: “The main conclusions of the first investigation carried out within the framework of the EU International Public Public Procurement Instrument (IPI) present clear evidence that China limits the access of the EU health products manufacturers to their public contracts in an unjust and discriminatory way.”
According to the numbers collected within the investigation, 87% of public contracts of well being merchandise in China have discriminatory measures in opposition to well being merchandise manufactured within the EU and EU suppliers. “The Commission has repeatedly raised this issue to the Chinese authorities,” says the assertion launched this Friday, “despite these efforts, China has not so far offered specific commitments that address discriminatory measures and practices.”
The subsequent step has been retaliation: “This response is provided, while guaranteeing the availability of all the health products necessary for the EU health system. There will be exceptions when there are no alternative suppliers,” says the fee.
“The measure aims to encourage China to cease discrimination against EU companies and health products manufactured in the EU and treat EU companies with the same frankness with which the EU treats Chinese companies and products. It is a response to the prolonged exclusion by China of health products manufactured in the EU of Chinese government contracts The union.
The Commissioner of Commerce, Maros Sefcovic, however, does not close the door to a negotiated solution, since he points out that “stays dedicated to dialogue to unravel this matter.”
https://elpais.com/economia/2025-06-20/la-ue-eleva-el-pulso-con-china-al-vetar-las-grandes-compras-publicas-de-su-material-sanitario.html