Frankfurt, 8 September 2026 – The European Commission is proposing a new law on public procurement. Commenting on this, VDMA Executive Director Thilo Brodtmann says:

• “The European Commission’s proposal on public procurement could – if properly made – present a genuine opportunity for the SME-dominated industrial sector. We must succeed in enshrining reciprocity in European public procurement law. For reasons of fairness, public contracts in Europe must only be open to companies from countries that grant European suppliers equivalent access to their own public contracts and funding programmes.”

• “Reciprocity also means that a ‘European preference’ should not be at the expense of established trade partnerships. It should also include third countries with which the EU has concluded a Free Trade Agreement containing a chapter on public procurement, or which are parties to the WTO Agreement on Government Procurement.”

• “Small and medium-sized enterprises in particular are the driving force behind the European machinery manufacturing industry. They must be able to participate more easily in public tenders. A key way of achieving this is to split large contracts into smaller, independent lots. This strengthens small and medium-sized enterprises whilst also broadening the supplier base.”

• “It is also important to ensure that duplicate rules and additional red tape are consistently avoided. In particular, the new law must not conflict with other European legislation, such as the proposed Industrial Accelerator Act.”

The VDMA represents 3500 German and European mechanical and plant engineering companies. The industry stands for innovation, export orientation and SMEs. The companies employ around 3 million people in the EU-27, more than 1.2 million of them in Germany alone. This makes mechanical and plant engineering the largest employer among the capital goods industries, both in the EU-27 and in Germany. In the European Union, it represents a turnover volume of an estimated 900 billion euros. Around 80 percent of the machinery sold in the EU comes from a manufacturing plant in the domestic market.