On March 3rd, inDUfed had the pleasure of welcoming Federal Minister Eléonore Simonet to one of our Brussels-based SME members, IMPREPACK Cartonnages & Imprimerie Winderickx, a family-owned business that has been active for several generations in food packaging—particularly for Belgian pralines.
This visit highlighted the daily reality of SMEs in the glass, paper, and cardboard sectors, which face a series of major challenges. We discussed the following topics in particular:
- Administrative simplification: The proliferation of European requirements and their complex implementation in Belgium significantly burden administrative procedures, particularly for SMEs that lack the same resources as large corporations.
- Technical training: Due to a lack of suitable training programs, companies must train their own teams. With high labor costs, this investment is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.
- International competitiveness: Several factors prevent the establishment of a true level playing field in Europe, notably higher energy and labor costs in Belgium compared to neighboring countries, as well as insufficient controls on low-cost imports from outside the EU.
We will continue to raise these concerns and actively advocate for the needs of our industrial SMEs, which are essential to our country’s economic vitality.
