r/europe • u/paneuropeanism_ Europe • 13h ago

News Von der Leyen: €300 billion in European savings flown overseas every year, primarily to the US, will be invested in Europe from now on. All 27 EU states agreed to establish the S&I Union, a step toward the full Capital Market Union

https://streamable.com/4h43qk
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u/ensoniq2k Germany 12h ago

EU should also make it easier to create new companies. Those packaging and electronic waste laws are a huge slap in the face for small startups.

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u/AdonisK Europe 8h ago

They are already working on this. It’s part of Draghi's report

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u/ensoniq2k Germany 4h ago

I always wonder how they could come up with such crap in the first place.

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u/wndtrbn Europe 11h ago

If that's what's holding you back, then you're definitely not cut out to start a company. Packaging and electronic waste laws are probably the easiest to comply with.

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u/ensoniq2k Germany 10h ago

Easy but very expensive if you have no idea how much you're going to sell. You need to pay in advance before you've made your first sale even if you have the product ready.

It's this kind of stance that kills innovation in the EU

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u/wndtrbn Europe 9h ago

If that was factual, but it isn't. Don't fight against fantasy worlds you made up yourself.

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u/ensoniq2k Germany 4h ago

Then tell me how it actually works? I went through all the paperwork

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u/Panigg 10h ago

Actually the new one is an absolute nightmare.

I'm making boardgames for a living. The new law states that I have to list all of the packaging in everything I make, including weight and other things. That part by itself is already a huge deal, but okay.

The other problem is that I will now have to register in 27 different countries, 27 different times with 27 different systems and I have to pay around 500€ to each country for the registration.

This is an absolute nightmare for small companies. How am I supposed to suddenly summon the extra 20k and manpower to get this all done?

Luckily only Germany said they would strictly enforce this or we just simply wouldn't be able to sell to smaller countries with lower demand.

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u/Vabla 8h ago

Having to register in every single country is absolute insanity. Like the direct opposite of what I'd expect of EU to work like.

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u/n00b678 Polska/Österreich 10h ago

If you're a big company, yes. But if you're small, it's a huge roadblock. Instead of just registering in a single country, they need to get a representative in every country they want to sell to. That can easily add up to tens of thousands of euros per year.

The technical requirements are not an issue, the bureaucracy is.

Edit: a real example.

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u/ensoniq2k Germany 10h ago

Exactly. It's expensive and it takes a lot of time before you even know your product will sell. Electronics waste is a few cents per metric ton but getting there already costs you a few hundred per country plus a lot of time.

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u/wndtrbn Europe 9h ago

Your real example is a gross exaggeration and not even close to an actual real example. Apart from being factually wrong (there is absolutely no reason at all to pre-pay 24k before you sent the first parcel), it also doesn't show a start-up company at all. Note that for any law, you always have hordes of people who have no idea what they're talking about and think it's the end of the world.

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u/n00b678 Polska/Österreich 9h ago

This person already has a business and ships to multiple EU countries. But they have only a few customers in a single country it will make no economic sense for them to ship there any more.

There should be a single registration and representative for the whole EU, not one per country. That's the opposite of a single market.

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u/wndtrbn Europe 8h ago

I agree with the last part, but I reject the idea that a company that ships to 27 different countries is a start-up.

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u/Vabla 8h ago

Why shouldn't a startup in EU ship to EU? It's like a company in your county only shipping to a few large cities.

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u/mantasm_lt Lietuva 7h ago

Why? You could be easily selling 100 items a year and sending to even more than 27 countries at once. E.g. some niche botique stuff that has good interwebs communities in english.

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u/bang0r 7h ago

Yeah exactly. It's not the 50s anymore. The internet exists and it's super common for micro businesses to live off of access to a EU- & World-wide small customer base.

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u/mantasm_lt Lietuva 6h ago

Well, now it's easier to live off world-wide (sans EU) sales. Even if you're based in EU :D All hail the eurosojuz and central bureau commissars :D

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u/less_unique_username 7h ago

A company that offers EU-wide shipping can’t be a startup?!

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u/n00b678 Polska/Österreich 8h ago

It's a small company that fixes tamagochis. It's not a big market. I don't know to how many countries they ship, I'm not them. But their case shows that small businesses (startups or not) will be unable to serve smaller EU countries, because the bureaucratic overhead will make it economically unviable.

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u/DivideSensitive France 7h ago

You can call it whatever you want; what matters is that for small-ish companies, the EU market is not one market, but 27 ones.

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u/Clear-Report8471 8h ago

under 10mln euro it's a small company, you could ship to 15-20 countries with that

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u/cyberslick18888 10h ago

It is vastly more prohibitive than almost anywhere else in the world.

Programs like that need to be designed in a way where they scale with businesses, or are otherwise offset via another mechanism.

It's a huge burden on small companies that will almost certainly not produce the type of product, the quanity of product or the widespread distribution of product in a manner that the law was intended for.

It's not a bad law because "hurr durr I hate the gubmint" it's a bad law because it doesn't do what it's supposed to the people it's supposed to be doing it to.

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u/wndtrbn Europe 9h ago

> It is vastly more prohibitive than almost anywhere else in the world.

Thankfully yes, and it's one of the reasons why Europe has the highest living standards in the world.

> Programs like that need to be designed in a way where they scale with businesses

That is already the case.

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u/dvdkon Czech Republic! 8h ago

We have our living standards because of laws that put large fixed costs on the creation/maintenance of a business? Yeah, I don't buy that.

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u/AdonisK Europe 8h ago

Not OP but it’s not just that, each country has different rules, taxing etc. it’s really hard for a startup to deal with any of these. Or more importantly it shouldn’t have to be this way.