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Ten years of ‘happy marriage’ of the EU-Japan Centre with EEN

Video and Booklet

The EU-Japan Centre for Industrial Cooperation – a joint venture launched in 1987 by the European Commission (DG GROW) and the Japanese Government (METI) for promoting all forms of industrial, trade and investment cooperation between the EU and Japan – has enjoyed being the EEN Member in Japan for the last 10 years.

What is EEN?

The Enterprise Europe Network is the world’s largest business support network comprising 600 organisations in over 60 countries. More than 3,000 experts support businesses to innovate and grow internationally. The EU-Japan Centre for Industrial Cooperation is the EEN Member in Japan since 2012, and regularly participates in the annual EEN Conference such as the 2019 one in Helsinki where we organised a specific session on the EU-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement.

What has been achieved by the EU-Japan Centre?

During this decade, we have contributed to connect European and Japanese companies towards building business partnerships. This has been done via many matchmaking events, workshops, meetings. Our performance was highly evaluated by EISMEA even if it is well known that doing business in/with Japan requires a lot of time and human investment as compared to other countries in the world.

• The first part of this booklet provides statistical information and key numbers per country, industrial and technological sectors, be it in terms of events organised, meetings, expressions of interest, requests made and business partnership agreements signed.
• On the qualitative side, the second part of the booklet provides 10 concrete examples – in a diversity of sectors and with different EU Member States – of the EU-Japan business partnerships that the Centre helped building and that the European and Japanese partners have agreed to make public¹.

¹Most of the time, the EU and Japanese businesses prefer keeping confidential their partnership agreements.