Speech by President of the Government at inauguration of South Summit - meeting between entrepreneurs and investors

Madrid

Mr President of the Chamber of Commerce of Spain, Madam President of Spain Startup, dear sponsors, entrepreneurs and friends,

It is a great honour for me to take part in this inauguration of the 2015 Summit, an event that has turned the city of Madrid into a nucleus of innovation and entrepreneurship at a global level, and which has firmly placed Spain on the calendar for the top echelons of international investment, attracted by the immense wealth of talent of the entrepreneurs in our country.

In barely three years, South Summit has become the most important conference in the whole of Southern Europe in its field. And this is how it should be. Whether in regard to civil society or our institutions, the entrepreneurial spirit has an unbeatable network of support and cooperation in Spain, and we are well aware of the differential value of our entrepreneurial asset as one of the strategic assets of Marca España.

But the true players of this summit are its 100 Startup finalists. I wish to personally thank them for the example they are to us all: entrepreneurs from a great number of industrial sectors who, not content with creating wealth and jobs, make technology their best instrument to contribute a new vision of the world in which we live and hence improve society.

All of you, those who are here today, but also a great many others, form, in your own right, part of the future of a country that has decided to throw off some of the shackles and stereotypes of its past to undertake a new path towards the future on the vehicle of a shared project.

Dear friends,

I am not going to list the dozens of measures which, by way of direct support, facilities, reductions in National Insurance contributions, incentives and tax breaks, the removal of bureaucratic paperwork, the government has adopted to help drive the projects of professionals and entrepreneurs, particularly SMEs and independent contractors. I will just mention three: the first Entrepreneur Act ever in this country; for innovation, the treatment of Corporate Income Tax, which even includes a negative tax, and the first Second Chance Act.

As I said, there have been many measures, but what is important is not the quantitative element but rather the fact that behind all of them is a philosophy calculated to boost your success and with every confidence in your capabilities.

You will always have your country backing you in both the good and the bad times. You have at your side a government that is proud of you and aware that the future of Spanish society is closely tied to yours; a future that now more than ever is within your grasp. Spain has everything to become a great cosmos of innovation and talent for development and entrepreneurial vision rather than in a microcosm, provided that we do not deviate from our national path to the future, a path which, although it was uncertain yesterday, today is unstoppable.

If you will allow me, I would like to give you some personal advice from my own experience. Be constant, never give up, guard your dreams for what they are, the greatest of treasures, and always maintain hope, even in those times in which you believe that challenges cannot be overcome. That is never the case. It will be the scale of the challenges that marks the extent of your triumph.

Thanks to people like you, Spain has an entrepreneurial future right before its eyes; thanks to the efforts and to the inherent determination of our collective nature, we are overcoming one of the worst moments in our recent history and we are facing a promising recovery for everyone. We have grown in the face of adversity as the great nation that we are. We have risen up and today, now that we are walking with our heads held high, we should feel that we are on a par with the great nations of the world. You only need to look around at this event to know that we have nothing to be envious of and that we have many things that provoke envy in others.

Yesterday we had to grit our teeth, that's true, but we can now look at the future that once again awaits the best from us all, and that is where you are now.

Three years ago, no-one in Spain, no-one at all, could imagine, and if they did they were obviously keeping it to themselves, that only three years on Spain, as the International Monetary Fund has said today, was going to grow by twice the European Union average in 2015 and considerably more than the major players in the EU, such as Germany, France and Italy.

Dear friends,

Spain has a great future and we have an exciting shared project. The aim is to maintain the current rate of job creation and extend this trend to the years to come in which you, together with the rest of society and with the help of the government, have to create two million more jobs. To do this, we need to maintain our economic policies, lower our taxes and offer facilities to entrepreneurs in the knowledge that society, and, in particular, entrepreneurs are the ones that generate well-being, wealth and jobs.

Thank you very much.