BIRMINGHAM – Acting Assistant United States Trade Representative for Europe and the Middle East Bryant Trick and European Commission Deputy Director General Hubert Gambs today opened the 12th U.S.-EU Small and Medium-Sized Enterprise (SME) Workshop in Birmingham, with Deputy Undersecretary of Commerce Diane Farrell, and hosted by the U.S. Export Assistance Center and the Alabama Department of Commerce. They were joined by Alabama Governor Kay Ivey and Alabama Secretary of Commerce Greg Canfield.
The conference was convened by the Office of the United States Trade Representative, the Department of Commerce, and the Small Business Administration, alongside the European Commission’s Directorate General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs, in collaboration with the Directorate General for Trade. The U.S.-EU SME Workshop is an opportunity for small businesses to engage directly and discuss relevant topics with government officials from the United States, the European Commission and EU Member States, as well as SMEs and associations from both sides of the Atlantic.
The location alternates each year between the United States and the European Union. The 2022 U.S.-EU SME Workshop was hosted by the EU in Augsburg, Germany. Topics for discussion at the SME Workshop in Alabama included advancing global trade leadership through the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council; SME access to finance; developing successful international strategies to drive equitable growth in the U.S. and the EU; and Alabama-EU trade and investment opportunities.
U.S. goods and services trade with the European Union totaled an estimated $1.3 trillion in 2022. Just over 92 percent of all U.S. exporters to the EU in 2021 (latest data available) were small- and medium-sized firms.
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