European Business Summits organises the Belgium House during the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos.
The forum featured conferences, workshops and panel discussions with the participation of CEOs and other top officers from major Belgian corporations such as AB InBev, Solvay, Fluxys, AvH-DEME, Belfius and Port of Antwerp. A cocktail reception was attended by Their Majesties the King and the Queen of Belgium and the Prime Minister.
The initiative took place throughout the 2024 WEF week and came near the start of Belgium’s six-month Presidency of the Council of the European Union.
"Defending democracy is not easy in today’s society, where nuance is often seen as something difficult and where democracy is perceived as the right of the majority. But the biggest virtue of democracy is protecting the minority opinions: If European democracies have been good at something, it is including them in the decision-making process."
"Energy is what modern civilisation is all about, as the physical economy is very energy-intensive. Historically, hydrocarbons have been fantastic but we need to limit CO2 emissions. For the future, we need non-weather-dependent energy: depending on how cheap storage gets, the ideal would be mixing nuclear energy with renewables."
"The biopharma industry is still the largest R&D investor in Europe, but the percentage has been decreasing. At the beginning of the century, 1 in 2 medicines was invented in Europe, now it’s 1 out of 5. We need a strong turnaround, especially from a regulatory point of view, to incentivise innovation and make it attractive for the pharmaceutical industry to make investments."
“We are channelling the collective energies of Belgium’s top industries – notably the biopharma, renewable energy and international logistics sectors – into a single, influential focus point.”
Our mission is twofold: we aim to bring politics and business together in order to provide them with an opportunity to debate and pursue their common goals, giving a voice to all sides of the debate. The other priority of EBS is to provide European institutions with a platform where they can place their top priorities in the spotlight and advance the development of new pieces of legislation through discussion with a variety of actors and stakeholders.
