‘Made in China’ has been a recurring concern for IP owners in Europe and the United States for several years.

‘Made in China’ has been a recurring concern for IP owners in Europe and the United States for several years. At its simplest, we have had to deal with China’s policy to acquire, use and build upon intellectual property from around the world in order to strengthen its own ability to manufacture goods and deliver services at scale.

That concern has not been confined to general media stories. It has appeared in advice from business groups and technology providers, in Parliamentary discussions, and in publications and advice from intelligence and security agencies.

Now the UK may be facing a different kind of challenge, not from a distant power, but from a much closer neighbour.

A new concern is beginning to emerge, one that might loosely be described as ‘Made in Europe’.

In this case, the issue is not IP appropriation. It is sovereignty, resilience and control. As the EU looks to reduce its exposure to externally owned technology platforms and data centre infrastructure, it is becoming more deliberate about where critical services come from, where data sits, and who ultimately controls the systems on which its economies depend.

The UK Department for Business and Trade has already sought views from affected companies, noting a trend in recent EU proposals towards European preference, including the use of policy tools to encourage the adoption of goods and services produced within the EU. It has specifically flagged concerns that the UK could be disadvantaged in sectors such as defence and high technology.

That matters because this is not only about policy in the narrow sense. It is also about trust. I am of the opinion that Europe’s concern is not simply to expand its own productive capacity, but to ensure that the personal data, business data and strategic digital infrastructure on which it relies, remain properly within its legal and practical control. That concern may be driven in part by long standing unease about China, but increasingly it also reflects a wider discomfort with dependence on the United States. It is no longer enough to know where the data is stored, it also matters who and where the platform is owned, which legal regime applies and who may ultimately be able to compel access to data, systems or metadata.

This is an important distinction. Europe’s position should not be dismissed as nationalism or protectionism alone. From its own perspective, it is a rational attempt to reduce dependency in a world where technology infrastructure has become strategic infrastructure. Cloud platforms, productivity suites, AI services and data environments are now part of critical supply chains and therefore national resilience.

That creates a serious question for the UK. If Europe becomes more intentional about favouring European platforms and providers, where does that leave British firms?

The answer is unlikely to be found in trying to recreate the hyper providers, either for yourselves or European customers. The UK has very few, if any, household name ‘hyper’ companies providing global technology platforms at that level. Sage is probably the closest thing the UK has to a major software platform business, Civo is a genuinely interesting sovereign cloud challenger and an important one to watch. Yet neither sits in the same class as Microsoft, Google, AWS or Salesforce and it would be unrealistic to pretend otherwise.

That does not mean the UK is irrelevant. It does mean the UK needs to think carefully about where our value lies.

The UK is more likely to remain relevant by being trusted, specialised and difficult to replace. That means focusing on areas where we still have real strength: high-value services, cyber security, regulated-sector expertise, systems integration, governance, AI implementation, data strategy and critically, the ability to help organisations operate across multiple legal and operational environments and jurisdictions – we have real strength in experience here. In other words, the UK may not own the biggest platforms, but we can still play a critical role in making technology work safely, effectively and competitively around the globe.

This is where the commercial implications become clearer. Although it’s clear that in some procurement cases, decisions will be shaped as much by sovereignty requirements as by technical merit, for UK providers selling into Europe they may need to build European hosting options, European operating entities, or deeper partnerships with EU-based providers in order to remain attractive. We need to be ready to have answers to the questions about ownership, hosting, support jurisdiction, subcontracting chains, metadata exposure and regulatory alignment.

That is why the challenge is not just political, it is strategic. If a customer such as Mercedes-Benz is encouraged, formally or informally, towards providers such as Scaleway or Aruba, then the pressure is felt most sharply by challengers such as Civo and by other UK firms that may have hoped proximity, capability and trust would be enough. In this environment, we may no longer have an automatic place in the European market. We need to look at how we can be the best supplier.

So I don’t believe the answer ‘Made in Europe’ should be ‘Made in Britain’. Not only is it not the right response, I don’t think there is much domestic appetite for it. The more serious question is whether the UK can position itself as an indispensable technology partner to Europe and beyond, even though we are no longer inside the EU.

I think it can, but only if it accepts the direction of travel. Europe is moving towards greater digital sovereignty. The UK is unlikely to reverse that. What it can do is adapt to it, work with it and build a proposition around trust, interoperability, specialism and strategic value whilst using European and other globally positioned tools. We should continue to build on our decades of pioneering global commerce, strong international trade and interoperability between zones – the service provider equivalent of an international hub airport.

That may be how the UK remains relevant, not by owning the whole stack, but by becoming a critical and trusted part of it.