European Business

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European Business is one of Europe's most international business magazines providing comprehensive reports und features about export-oriented companies, covering all branches of industry, commerce and service.

14/09/2026

What is the actual cost of an unplanned milking stoppage on a modern dairy farm?

It is not just the lost milk. It is the cascade: cows in discomfort, mastitis that went undetected for hours, a farmer who has not slept.

The case for automation in dairy has long been framed around yield and labour. Maarten van Raaij, CEO of Fullwood JOZ Group, puts the argument differently: the value is in what the system catches before it becomes a crisis. Each milking session generates a health profile per animal. Deviations from normal patterns trigger action early. Cows needing attention are separated automatically. What he calls a digital twin of both machine and cattle runs continuously in the background.

The harder question for farm operators is not whether the technology works. It is whether their current setup gives them any warning at all before something goes wrong.

Read the full interview: https://www.european-business.com/en/interviews/fullwood/how-fullwood-helps-shape-the-future-of-dairy-farming

11/09/2026

Which Data Act requirement starts applying to new connected products this week?

For connected products and related services placed on the EU market after 12 September 2026, product and related service data must be easily accessible to users and free of charge. Where relevant and technically feasible, access must be direct.

For mechanical engineering, that is more than a compliance issue. Machine data can sit at the heart of maintenance and service offers, so greater customer access also affects the commercial model around connected products.

Nothing in the installed base changes overnight. What changes is the specification of what you ship next.

The question is therefore not only whether your next product meets the requirement, but what your service offer is worth when customers have greater access to the data.

Has your engineering team already prepared for the change?

10/09/2026

What will you actually learn on Thursday at 14:15?

Not just the rate. The move to 2.50% is widely expected, so the decision itself may be confirmation rather than surprise.

The two things that matter follow it on Thursday.

First, the September staff projections. The ECB publishes updated forecasts for growth and inflation out to 2028, and that is where you can read how persistent it expects the energy shock to be. A temporary shock is one you sit out. A persistent one is one you finance around.

Second, the wording. Lagarde's comments on where policy goes next will matter as much as the number itself. Anything that sounds like we are not finished yet could matter more to a 2027 refinancing plan than the decision on the day.

For a mid sized company that distinction is not academic. It decides whether you fix now or wait, whether the capex you have parked gets a date, and what you put in the model for the cost of money in the year after next.

So the useful way to watch Thursday is not just to read the number. Read the projections and listen closely to the wording that follows.

09/09/2026

How full are Europe's gas stores right now?

Around 67%. Roughly 12 percentage points below the same point last year. The EU's legal filling target remains 90%, while the rules allow flexibility in difficult market conditions. The Gas Coordination Group has also said that a storage level of 80% at the end of summer would be sufficient to secure winter supply.

That single figure explains much of this week's agenda. Euro area energy inflation is running at 14.3% year on year, while overall inflation stands at 3.3%. Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remains heavily disrupted, adding further pressure to European energy markets.

It is also why movements in the European gas market deserve attention alongside the monthly statistics. A monthly figure tells you what has already happened. The gas market increasingly reflects what companies may still have to pay as the heating season moves closer.

There is a second reason to keep this on the desk. Most of what is on the calendar this week gets smaller as the week ends. Gas storage becomes more relevant with every week Europe moves closer to winter, particularly with storage levels well below last year's. Current GIE data puts EU storage at 66.9%.

The practical question for a management board is short. How far into the winter is your energy budget actually covered, and at what price did you cover it?

08/09/2026

When a major Western European retailer needs frozen fruit repacked into 120-gram smoothie portions with shelf-ready presentation, where does that work actually land?

Increasingly, in Poland. Not because it is cheap, but because the combination of raw material access, technical labor, and packaging investment is now hard to replicate closer to the retail shelf.

Adam Ulmer, CEO of Ulmer S.K.A., makes the structural argument plainly: Western European customers were actively seeking reliable production partners in Poland, where raw materials, skilled labor, and technical expertise are readily available. That pull came from the retailers themselves, not from a Polish push.

The deeper tension for procurement and category managers: the further you move value-added steps toward the source, the less visible and controllable quality becomes. The answer Ulmer describes is not nearshoring as a cost play, but as a capability bet, backed by automation investment and packaging development done alongside the retailer, not after the brief lands.

For anyone rethinking frozen food supply chains, the question is not whether to use Eastern European processing capacity. It is whether your partner there is building capability or just running volume.

Read the full interview: https://www.european-business.com/en/interviews/ulmer-s-k-a-/packaging-precision-from-poland

07/09/2026

What does a country choose when it already has market access without membership?

Iceland answered that question on Saturday.

Voters rejected restarting EU accession talks by 52.8% to 47.2%, on record turnout. Roughly 13,000 votes separated the two sides.

The referendum is formally non-binding. Politically, it is not. Prime Minister Frostadóttir says EU membership is off the agenda for the rest of her mandate, and parliament could now withdraw Iceland’s 2009 application altogether.

Why did the No campaign win? Sovereignty, especially control over Iceland’s fishing waters.

But there is another factor: Iceland already has access to the single market through the EEA without EU membership.

For Brussels, the result is a setback. The geopolitical case for enlargement lost to a fishing fleet and a ballot box.

But Iceland’s vote raises a bigger question. The EEA is often seen as a waiting room on the way to membership. What if, for some countries, it is the destination?

Does Europe need more members, or better partnerships?

Tell us what you think.

03/09/2026

Which date on your autumn calendar was set in Brussels, and did you put it there yourself?

The summer break is over. The files are back, and this time they carry deadlines rather than intentions.

September alone brings two verdicts. On 10 September the ECB decides on rates again. It is the first autumn signal on whether June's hike was the beginning of a path or a single move. On 29 September the chat control file returns to the trilogue, where the permanent regulation gets negotiated, and with it the future of confidential communication in Europe.

One date prices your credit. The other prices your privacy. Most boards track the first one closely and treat the second as an IT matter. That split is a mistake, because the second one reaches into how your company communicates with clients, counsel and staff.

Then comes delivery season. Bids for Europe's AI gigafactories close on 12 November, with roughly 30 billion euros in play. Dublin's presidency has four files pencilled in for the end of the year: the Savings and Investments Union, the Cybersecurity Act, the 28th regime for companies, and the digital euro. Berlin wants its pension reform passed by December.

In July we wrote that roadmaps are abundant and delivery is not. This autumn is where that sentence gets tested. Four presidency files plus a national reform in one quarter is an ambitious load, and the record of recent years suggests that some of it slips. The useful question for a managing director is not whether everything arrives, but which items you are already building assumptions around.

The horizon beyond December is set too. The AI Act's high risk regime lands in December 2027, which sounds distant until you count the procurement cycles between now and then. And the fight over the EU's budget for 2028 to 2034 will shape almost everything else, including what money is available for the industrial programmes that companies are currently being invited to bid into.

Six dates, one quarter. Some will move markets, some will move your compliance budget, and at least one will do both.

So we are asking the people running companies: which of these files moves your business most this autumn?

Tell us, and we will cover it accordingly, on European Business.

02/09/2026

Can a food business stay genuinely craft once it reaches industrial scale, or does the identity that built the brand quietly dissolve under the pressure to grow?

It is a real tension in the organic sector, and it does not resolve itself neatly. The default move is to expand the range, automate, push into new channels and call the result progress. The harder discipline is knowing what not to do.

Sarah Baensch, Managing Director of Ölmühle Solling, puts it plainly: the ambition is not growth at any price, but stability, process optimisation and resilience in a market shaped by economic uncertainty and AI-driven change. After 30 years and roughly 250 products, the company still keeps as much of the value chain as possible on its own site, maintains decade-long relationships with farmers and runs on a culture where employees stay for decades rather than seasons.

The uncomfortable question that raises for the wider organic food industry: if your competitive edge is authenticity and continuity, every shortcut you take to scale is a small bet against the thing you are actually selling.

Read the full interview: https://www.european-business.com/en/interviews/oelmuehle-solling-gmbh/expanding-the-boundaries-of-the-organic-oil-business

24/08/2026

When an AI company's first instinct is to sue the law rather than fix its product, pay attention. That is a procurement signal, not a headline.

Here is what happened. The US state of Minnesota passed a law targeting non-consensual sexual deepfakes. Of all the AI firms operating in the country, Elon Musk's xAI became the first to go to court to strike it down, rather than adjust its Grok model or push to amend the rule. The move follows lawsuits over sexual images that Grok itself generated, including one brought by the mother of one of Musk's own children.

The company frames it as a defence of free expression. Critics make the opposite case: non-consensual sexual imagery is not speech, it is harm, and a frontier lab that spends its first major legal move fighting a ban on it is revealing its priorities. You do not have to resolve that debate to notice what it tells you about the vendor.

For European companies, this is not American culture-war noise, it is due diligence. In the EU, non-consensual sexual deepfakes are squarely illegal, and since 2 August the AI Act's transparency duties are enforceable, with fines up to 15 million euros or 3 percent of global turnover. What plays as a lawsuit in Minnesota would be a compliance breach in Munich. The model you embed inherits its maker's choices about safety, moderation and what it will defend in court.

So the board question, and it is a serious one: do you actually know what your AI vendor is willing to litigate for, and does it match the rules you operate under?

Follow European Business for the analysis behind the headlines.

21/08/2026

Can Europe buy its way to AI sovereignty? One company is about to test the question with billions.

The backdrop is a year we have tracked closely. Washington gated its most powerful models behind government approval. China answered by releasing its flagship models as free open weights. Europe, dependent on both, kept asking who its own champion would be. The loudest answer is Mistral, the Paris lab founded in 2023, now reported to be raising around 3 billion euros at a valuation above 20 billion, nearly double its last confirmed mark of 11.7 billion. Its revenue has gone from roughly 20 million dollars a year to more than 400 million. One caveat worth stating plainly: the mega-round is reported, not yet confirmed closed.

The strategy is what makes it interesting, not the number. Mistral sells sovereignty as a feature: open-weight models European companies can run on their own servers, no foreign kill switch, EU rules by design. That its largest backer is ASML, the chip-equipment giant at the heart of Europe's industrial base, tells you this is industrial policy dressed as venture capital. BNP Paribas, AXA and Stellantis are already customers.

Now the honest ledger. Mistral still trails the American frontier on raw capability, it runs on Nvidia chips and partly on US cloud, and it faces a flood of capable Chinese open models arriving for free. Sovereignty is a genuine advantage for governments and regulated industries that cannot depend on US labs, or it is a procurement preference that erodes the moment rivals catch up. Europe has bet more than 14 billion dollars that it is the former.

So the question for European decision-makers: would you standardise on a European model to control your own stack, even at a performance discount?

Follow European Business for the analysis behind the headlines.

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