NEWEST CEO says Europe should become an 'extroverted economy'

Hello to thecnbc.com audience. I’m CNBC contributor Michelle Caruso Cabrera. I’m in Milan, Italy at the campus of SDA Buconi, and that’s the School of Management. And we’re here because there’s a very important conference going on the Influence, Relevance and Growth conference designed to address the issues of competitiveness facing Europe right now. Joining us is the brain that’s behind this conference. The creator of this conference is Fernando Napolitano. He is the CEO of newest and has brought together a lot of people to discuss these issues. Good to see you, Fernando. Good to see you Michelle, and thank you for having me here. Tell us about how you feel the conference is going. What are the important issues being addressed here? Well, the the the conference is going well. It’s an innovative formula we would like to create with the support of the media. An ongoing discussion on the most important themes. So that sound bites from this conference could be taken by you and your colleagues and and get opinions. Because the the hypothesis is that the business world needs to transfer know how to policy makers in the liberal democracy. The police political system needs more support, needs more know how in order to do the right things on industries and technologies that are very complex. So you take not only the economic growth, inflation these days, artificial intelligence, healthcare, regenerative medicine and so on and so forth. So the idea here is that by coalescing people that generate know how with the media company, we are able to create a kind of education and information that is not there. So this conference is a step of a process. And we have put together, you know, Aspen Institute from United States Counseling on Foreign Relations, asking from Italy, Bocconi, the School of Management, and just to reiterate, but this year of Financial Times awarded the Bocconi #3 in the world their MBA. So we now have top institution, and I think it’s in their mandated mission to make this happen. And so the conference is debating this, but we will create content out of this conference so that we can use after the conference for future interviews both on CNBC, cnbc.com and the Italian subsidiary of CNBC class, CNBC. Some of the issues that I know are being talked about are the the size of the capital markets, strengthening them, growing them, giving them more scale, not just the capital markets. Perhaps the defense sector would be necessary telecom banking, how much of that is the discussion here and how receptive do you think are the the policy makers going to be to the recommendations? Well that’s that’s a very interesting point. We, we just published the white book with Bocconi and one of the leading law firm Chiomenti and and we are just taking the numbers. And if you look at the market capitalization, which is one of the measures, you see that the European Union its subscale in every possible industry that is geopolitically relevant. So where we are today, we wish to do 2 things. Number one, make sure that Europe, it’s becomes an extroverted economy, so looks at the outside rather than the inside #2 that he’d realized that in geopolitical relevant industries, defence, technology, banking, Internet, pharmaceutical, we start to have something which is of scale, so that we are important to the matters that are happening, for example in the wars or in shaping the new world order. We are not there yet because we’re a lump sum of national champions. In Europe we have only one exception, which is Airbus. Airbus is of course a manufacturer of airplanes and today if you want to buy an airplane, there is either Boeing or Airbus. So we got a success story and an operating model and and doing very well considering the situation that Boeing is in in the United States at the moment. Of course Boeing is going through its challenges, but it’s you know it’s it’s an extraordinary company or has made a history of aviation. I’m definitely sure they’ll be back on track. And Airbus is competing banking wise, the largest member of the European Union is #220 in the world, JP Morgan is #14. So that means that the moment that for example, and I hope soon we need to reconstruct Ukraine or you know, Middle East, the United States can call in to bankers and satisfy the need, Europeans need to call in 20 members, 20 CE OS, try to get an agreement. So scale does matter. And the idea of this coalition is that by having this meeting and these conversations, we can create the political demand that is necessary to make sure that the politician respond, because that has been the hurdle, right? Politicians all over the world seem to be against scale. We’re running into it, into the United States. You run into it all the time in Europe. The only place where they seem to really like scale are the Chinese state owned companies where that government will absolutely champion and empower their state owned companies. How do we get over the the all around the world those politics? Well I I don’t have the perfect answer but I can give you a parallel. The moment that the social media became very popular, all politician were forced to use it. So it became a political demand by the stakeholders. I mean you need to be on the social. By the same logic, we want to create a body of know how and knowledge. And here is where the media is strategic because you can make these issues understandable, accessible and palatable. We did be probably belong to some of the technical places of business or boring. We don’t have the jargon, we don’t have the empathy and that’s where the the coalition is successful. When you get the the body of knowledge and you make it through the media interesting and I think that that generally speaking whoever is interested in the economy, her own job is small investment, buying a stock, these kind of information are critical to understand where the world is going. So The thing is, how you make all this thing that seems in the troposphere, you know, geopolitics, economy, you make it more palatable, you make it more human. I think that these are issues that affect the the, the life of ordinary people. And this is the reason why we’re doing this. Thanks.