PwC study: Five publicly-listed Austrian companies among the top 1,000 in R&D

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The 1,000 largest publicly listed companies have never invested as much in research and development as they did in 2018.

Their spending on innovation totaled EUR 782 billion, or 11.4 percent higher than in the year 2017. This was the conclusion of a study carried out by Strategy&, the strategy consulting arm of the auditing and consulting group PwC. Austria is represented in the ranking for the first time, namely with five companies. These companies include the sensor and chip producer ams, the steel group voestalpine, the IT service provider S&T, the toll specialist TrafficCom and the Andritz technology group. These companies combined to invest about EUR 700 million in research in 2018. The R&D intensity of ams at 20.1 percent is the highest in the entire German-speaking region of Europe. “This is a strong argument for the positive development of Austria as a business location”, says Harald Dutzler, Partner at Strategy& Austria.