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Honourable Minister of State and of Internal Affairs
Honourable Chairman of the Board of the Portuguese Industrial Association
Honourable Chairman of the General Meeting of AIP
Honourable Commissioner for the Commemorations of the 170 years of AIP
Dr. Jorge Sampaio
Businessmen
Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is with great pleasure that I join the celebration of the 170 years of activity of the Portuguese Industrial Association. It is an historical landmark in the life of any institution, but yet more important since it recalls one of our first initiatives in associating business enterprises and an institution that has been so deeply involved in all the changes we have gone through in Portugal, and in the corresponding economic and social alterations.

I have closely followed AIP’s route during the last three decades, both within the governmental duties I held, as an economist and as a member of the public, interested in the dynamics and in the activities carried out by associations.

It is fair to recognize the ambition with which AIP endeavoured to answer the challenges faced by the economic development of the Country and the strategic vision which has ruled its actions on behalf of the modernization and strengthening of Portuguese industry.

That ambition and that strategic vision bestow on AIP – Confederation of Business Enterprises, now as in the past, a relevant role in overcoming the new challenges which Portugal is facing, in a world where the rhythm and the gamut of change is ever more intense and in which the global competitive picture in which our economy is inserted is ever more demanding.

The Portuguese economic development, the level of employment and the improvement in the living conditions of the people of Portugal depend upon our capacity for innovation and in ensuring higher levels of productivity and to thus reach new – and necessary – levels of competitiveness on a global scale. This is reality and this is where the great challenge we are facing resides.

Our companies need to be more competitive. Our human resources need to be better qualified. The macro and micro economic environment must, in turn, be more propitious for sustainable development, favouring confidence and investment and opening up to initiative, innovation and merit.

If, on the one hand, the economic operators have all the right to demand that the State is more efficient in the use of its resources, that it acts quickly and transparently, and that it adopts policies that favour productivity, it is also true that there is an ample margin for improvement by the business sector, whether in management practices and capabilities, whether in the incorporation of critical competitiveness factors in the goods and services it markets.

As I have had the opportunity of underlining several times, it is important that a culture of responsibility and demand is asserted amongst us, and that each one, in his own sphere and on a par with his rights, view contributing to the progress of the Country as his duty, adding value and quality to his product, in an attitude of creative initiative and civic autonomy.

It is thus my belief that the role of agents of change belongs, in effect, to business entrepreneurs, through the promotion of technological modernization and innovation in products and processes, fostering labour qualification, investing more and, especially, better.

It is the responsibility of entrepreneurs and managers to specifically promote products with higher added value, to pursue the improvement in the quality of management and in the organization of production, to win new markets, and in the growing integration of the knowledge produced by Universities or centres of investigation.

I also believe that, in many of these angles, the contribution of the associations can and must be important, especially within the universe of the Small and Medium sized Portuguese companies, through initiatives which generate gains in size and in critical density, through inciting partnerships and competitive cooperation, or through the promotion and consolidation of the best business practices. It is thus with great satisfaction that I record that the programme of the officers of AIP, who were inducted today, establishes as a priority the support of Small and Medium Enterprises.

We have in Portugal, at this time, many cases of successful, modern and competitive businesses in open markets, but we need many more.

In a society which is more than ever based on knowledge, the size of companies, as is the case with countries, is not, on its own, a determining factor. What is in effect determining is the opening to innovation and to the world, the will to undertake, the capacity to identify and include knowledge and to use it for new business or working methods.

In a highly competitive world which, at the same time, is a world of accumulated complementarities and interdependencies, it is imperative that businesses cooperate and share information and develop partnerships and contact networks, both nationally and internationally.

It is in great part the responsibility of business leaders to anticipate new routes, engender the necessary fractures and to stimulate a new strategic bearing for our economy. Space must be created for the potential entrepreneur who exists in us and in the companies to give voice without obsolete bureaucratic conditionings or encumbrances to competition. We have definitively to get away from the paradigm of passivity, from depending on the State, from the fear of risk and from being resigned to median performance.

Portuguese businessmen must instead assert their entrepreneurship, use the windows opened by information and communication technology and find the new field of opportunity offered by globalization. What businessmen must demand from the State is, above all, that it does not constitute an obstruction to their entrepreneurial liberty.

It is an illusion to think that the solution to the Country’s economic problems lies in the rethoric against globalization and in setting up protective barriers so that inefficient businesses survive in the face of external competition.

But it is also sensible to believe that eventual transfers of the leadership of large national companies to foreign hands must be followed up with great care and must not be made easy, since this could involve costs for the Country as a whole. This is recognized by almost all of the European governments.

As I stated in the Porto Faculty of Economics, in April, 2005: “The costs [of the transfer of the centres of strategic decision from national to foreign hands] reside in the lesser capacity of the Country to externally defend its interests, in taking lower advantages of the qualified national human resources, in the weakening of knowledge and investigation, in the lesser degree of national self esteem and social cohesion, in the Country’s lower answering capacity in moments of crisis and when facing exogenous shocks”.

We must institute a nimble and flexible business culture, without prejudicing a strong ethical and social responsibility. Many Portuguese businessmen have already understood that the best available support lies in themselves, in their attitude towards problems and challenges. And there equally are, already, many Portuguese companies who have understood that there is no conflict between their economic health and with their actions as active operators in the improvement of the society they are a part of, and for whom the social dimension is a relevant component.

The Portuguese must be mobilized for the tasks of development. Time is short and the rest of the world will not wait for us. We have to go further and faster. We cannot conform to a median status, with apparently easy routines or solutions which hide complacency or lack of ambition to advance. Survival is not enough. It is necessary to win, to establish a situation which projects the Country and inscribes our capacities in a very demanding world which sooner or later, punish those which resist change. For Portuguese businessmen, this is a time for decision, not procrastination.

The increase in productivity and in the competitiveness of our companies is, in any case, an objective which we must face with confidence. Portugal belongs to a privileged economic space and the intense debate, European and Worldwide, on the best practices to promote economic and social progress allows us to think of the future in a frame of relative stability with regard to the options in matters of political economy. It is not by chance that Portugal figures as one of the fifteen most globalized countries in the world, in accordance with the more recent results of the globalization index of a reputed Swiss institute of economic investigation (KOF).

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The Portuguese have already proven their opening towards the world, their capacity to adapt and their will to risk and to win. This is the moment to raffirm these qualities. The Country needs the entrepreneurial actions of its businessmen and counts on the impelling force of the Portuguese Industrial Association whose 170 years we are today celebrating.