Working Group of ETPO

Greek state trade and investment promotion agency Enterprise Greece will host the spring 2020 working group meeting of information professionals for the association of European Trade Promotion Organizations, a landmark year in Europe’s decennial growth and jobs strategy.

The meeting will be held in Athens in April 2020, following the working group meetings being hosted in Reykjavik in September this year, in Oslo next April and in Dublin in September 2019. It will be the first time Athens has hosted the event since 1994.

The European Trade Promotion Organisations Working Group of Information Professionals was initiated by the members of the ETPO main conference in 1973. The group’s mandate was to promote the exchange among European TPOs in the area of information processing and dissemination. Since then, the working group has been meeting twice a year to discuss and share topics regarding information systems, internet presences, as well as new products and services offered by the ETPO members.

The decision to host the spring 2020 meeting in Athens followed a proposal by Enterprise Greece at the 83^rd ETPO-WGIP gathering in Prague, April 26-27. Speaking to the 25 national delegations present, Czech Minister for Industry and Trade Tomáš Hüner, the keynote speaker at the meeting, referred to the necessity of implementing free trade agreements, but also to the intensive efforts of partner countries to modernize economic models and promote exports.

The discussion of the working group also touched upon the following issues:

• The importance of digital and social media as corporate tools for promoting commerce, including e-commerce, as well as applications and online services like chatbots or Yammer
• The need to conform with the European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
• The development of the working group’s new website to serve the general needs of the ETPOs
• Various efforts and initiatives on a European level to help SMEs more effectively access international markets.