Industrial Policy & Trade Monitor· 2679 actions· ✨ 92 recent

On 1 May 2026 the trade pillar of the EU-Mercosur Partnership Agreement (the "Interim Trade Agreement", iTA) entered provisional application between the European Union and the four Mercosur states — Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay — following its publication in the EU Official Journal on 27 February 2026 alongside the broader EU-Mercosur Partnership Agreement (EMPA). The iTA covers goods (eliminating duties on more than 90% of bilateral trade over a transition period including immediate cuts on cars, pharmaceuticals, wine and olive oil), services, government procurement at federal and state level, intellectual property (344 EU geographical indications protected), SPS/TBT disciplines, and a sustainability chapter. Mercosur receives tariff-rate quotas on agri-food exports (beef, poultry, sugar, ethanol, honey). Provisional application proceeds pending full ratification of EMPA by the Council, European Parliament and all EU national parliaments and a pending CJEU opinion; only the trade pillar applies provisionally.

The European Commission approved EUR 321.8 million (approx. USD 343.4 million) in additional German state aid (case SA.104276) for Salzgitter Flachstahl GmbH's SALCOS ("Salzgitter Low CO2 Steelmaking") Stage I decarbonisation project. The increment lifted the German federal and Lower Saxony state governments' combined funding commitment for Stage I to EUR 1.322 billion, split roughly two-thirds federal (BMWK) and one-third Land Niedersachsen, after the German government publicly confirmed the top-up on 24 February 2026. Stage I comprises a 100MW electrolyser, a direct-reduction-iron plant, and an electric-arc furnace intended to replace blast-furnace/basic- oxygen-furnace production and cut CO2 emissions from the affected process by up to 95%, targeting start-up from 2027.

On 10 November 2025 the European Commission conditionally approved, under the Foreign Subsidies Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2022/2560), the c. €14.7bn acquisition of German polymer and polyurethane producer Covestro AG by Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC). The Phase II investigation identified foreign-subsidy distortions including an unlimited UAE State guarantee covering ADNOC and a committed capital increase by ADNOC's state-backed parent into Covestro. To clear the transaction, ADNOC committed to remove the State guarantee, Covestro committed to maintain existing R&D cooperation agreements with EU competitors, and Covestro committed to license its present and future sustainability-related patents (c. 200 patents) to qualifying EU market participants on pre-established transparent terms for ten years. This is the second-ever FSR Phase II conditional clearance (after the September 2024 e&/PPF Telecom decision) and the first FSR remedy package to deploy sustainability-IP licensing as a structural commitment.

On 16 June 2025 the European Investment Bank (EIB) signed a EUR 1.6 billion loan facility with French and Spanish transmission-system operators RTE and Red Eléctrica to finance the Bay of Biscay electricity interconnection, the first submarine power link between the two countries. First tranches totalling EUR 1.2 billion were signed at EIB headquarters in Luxembourg; the project separately holds a EUR 578 million EU Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) grant. The 400 km link (300 km submarine, connecting Cubnezais, France to Gatika, Spain) will raise cross-border exchange capacity from 2,800 MW to 5,000 MW and is expected to enter service in 2028.

On 9 April 2025 the European Commission adopted Communication COM(2025)165, the AI Continent Action Plan, setting out a five-pillar strategy to make the EU a global AI leader. The pillars are (1) computing infrastructure, (2) data for AI, (3) strategic AI innovation and adoption, (4) AI skills and talent, and (5) regulatory simplification. Headline commitments include mobilising approximately €200bn of public+private investment via the InvestAI initiative announced at the AI Action Summit in Paris (11 February 2025), deploying 13 AI Factories (HPC-anchored shared compute facilities) plus regional antennas, building 5 AI Gigafactories powered by >100,000 advanced AI processors with €20bn earmarked from InvestAI, launching the Apply AI Strategy and Data Union Strategy, and proposing a Cloud and AI Development Act with a public consultation closing 4 June 2025. The one-year progress report (9 April 2026) confirmed 19 AI Factories deployed across EU supercomputers with 13 Antennas providing regional access, and €1bn in Apply AI funding calls earmarked.

Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/612 of 24 March 2025 amends the EU steel safeguard regime first imposed by Regulation (EU) 2019/159, materially tightening the tariff-rate quota (TRQ) system that governs imports across 26 product categories of finished and semi-finished steel. The Commission cuts the annual liberalisation rate (the volume by which TRQs grow each year) from 1% to 0.1%, effectively freezing the in-quota volumes available to third-country exporters at near-current levels through the safeguard's expiry on 30 June 2026. The regulation also repeals the carry-over mechanism that previously allowed unused quarterly TRQ volumes to roll into the next quarter for product categories under significant import pressure, and eliminates the ability of exporting countries to access the residual (other-country) quota in the final quarter of each safeguard year for those categories. The latter change forecloses the route by which Chinese, Indian, Turkish, Korean and Vietnamese mills had increasingly back-filled into unused Russian and Belarusian quota allocations after the 2022 sanctions disruption. Most adjustments enter into force on 1 April 2025; the slower liberalisation pace and the carry-over removal in the most pressured categories take effect 1 July 2025. The measure is the headline trade-policy deliverable of the European Steel and Metals Action Plan unveiled by the Commission on 19 March 2025, and it is explicitly framed as a defensive response to (i) global overcapacity in Chinese steel and (ii) anticipated trade diversion into the EU after the United States reinstated universal 25% Section 232 steel/aluminum tariffs on 12 March 2025. Above-quota imports remain subject to the 25% out-of-quota duty inherited from the 2019 safeguard.

Regulation (EU) 2023/2854 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 December 2023 on harmonised rules on fair access to and use of data — the "Data Act" — was published in the Official Journal on 22 December 2023, entered into force on 11 January 2024, and applies generally from 12 September 2025 (with longer transitional periods for IoT product-design obligations under Article 3(1), which apply to products placed on the market after 12 September 2026, and for the data-portability standardisation framework, applicable from 12 September 2027). The Data Act is the third pillar of the EU data-economy framework alongside the GDPR (personal data) and the Data Governance Act 2022/868 (data-intermediation services), and is the world's first horizontal statutory regime governing access to and portability of industrial / IoT / non-personal data — covering by-design data-availability obligations on connected-product manufacturers, a mandatory cloud- switching framework with progressive elimination of switching charges, B2G emergency data-sharing in exceptional needs, unfair-contract-terms protection for SMEs, and safeguards against unlawful international government access to non-personal data held in EU cloud.