Portugal’s foreign affairs minister, João Gomes Cravinho, has said that it was vital to increase funding for AICEP, the country’s foreign trade and investment agency, in order to develop mechanisms for companies to work with the state on their internationalization
“What is fundamental is the increase in funding. Funding has to come from various sources and we now have a set of new funds that did not exist in the past,” said João Gomes Cravinho on Wednesday.
According to the head of Portuguese diplomacy, among the new funding for the Investment and Foreign Trade Agency of Portugal (AICEP) are “European funds linked to the digital transition and energy transition.
“We have to know how to go about using them, so there is also a learning process there. On the other hand, we have to develop ‘win-win’ mechanisms, as they say in Brazil,” the minister pointed out.
In other words, explained João Gomes Cravinho, “mechanisms in which companies work together with the State institution, AICEP and others, to finance their internationalisation and bring in other Portuguese companies with them”.
“Yes, greater internationalisation of the Portuguese economy means greater investment in these internationalisation processes,” the minister said, speaking to journalists at the end of the closing session of the AICEP 15th anniversary conference in Viseu.
For this internationalisation, the minister stressed, it is also required to “adapt the way of working to the new challenges facing Portuguese companies,” such as “digitalisation and all that this implies in terms of production processes.
“The issue of energy transformation of green transition, the panorama that we currently live in of war with the instability that this brings. When the government gives the internationalisation of the Portuguese economy the role of an engine for our growth, it means that we have to pay particular attention and be very close to companies,” he said.
And for that, he added, the government has to “have a deeper contact, support companies that are not internationalised but would like to be, because the growth of internationalisation has to come from there, most of it, which means empowering those companies”, for example, through “generational transformation”.
“We know that young people are better educated than people my age and, therefore, generational transformation in companies helps this greater openness to internationalisation. But those who have never participated in an internationalisation process need support, no one is born already taught,” he said.
Given the current context of war in Europe, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, internationalisation has “higher risks”, which “are easily identifiable”, according to Gomes Cravinho admitted.
“They result from the unpredictability of the course of war, the duration of war and the consequences of war,” he continued.
In this sense, the minister pointed to a concern that “is beginning to exist” all over the world and that “covid itself had already shown”, that is, “the globalisation that existed until now” which showed the need for “a balance between trust and dependence”.
“We can only be dependent on those in whom we trust. That balance will cause a change in investments, in supply chains and the Portuguese economy, Portugal is a country that in that respect has some ease of contact with the whole world. The Portuguese economy may be one of the beneficiaries of this process of reorganization of the world economy in the light of wars and uncertainties,” he said.
