Czech Business Today

Member States can submit their recovery and resilience plans to the Commission until 30^th April. The Commission will have up to two months to assess the plans and subsequently the Council will have four weeks to adopt its decision on the final approval of each plan. Representatives of Czech businesses who are involved in the discussion on the national recovery plan with the Government believe that it does not sufficiently reflect the priorities which have a higher potential to increase the competitiveness, resilience and future growth of the Czech economy.

They want to see more emphasis on the digital transformation of Czech companies. Investments in the digital transformation of companies are clearly investments in the further development of the economy. In the draft of the Czech national recovery plan, the allocation for the digitization of companies is 0.5% of the total allocation. The Ministry of Industry claims that it has set aside CZK 44 billion from the National Recovery Plan for digital transformation.

According to the Confederation of Industry, 80 percent of this amount will be swallowed by the public sector or will be spent in areas that are not related to digitization. The Czech Government has only set aside CZK 1 billion for the important digital transformation of companies, i.e. half a percent of the total CZK 172 billion from the EU.

The Confederation of Industry of the CR asks to increase this amount to CZK 10 billion and enable companies to finance investments in the digitization of production processes and to open access to digitization funds to large companies without major restrictions. The companies should be able to use the funding to educate workers and increase their digital skills, to invest in cybersecurity, to transform their data architecture and to use digital solutions to implement advanced automation and robotics.