EU – Baltic States, Forum, Internet, Latvia, Markets and Companies, Technology

Gerhards mentioned three aspects important for attaining the goal – increasing trust in the digital single market, digitization of public administration, and continuing work on cyber security measures.

The minister in particular highlighted digitization of public administration, offering Latvia as a good example. "We have a strong portal of public e-services, "Latvija.lv"," said Gerhards. "Furthermore, 89 percent of businessmen communicate with the public administration online," he added.

Gerhards also mentioned the acclaimed machine translation tool Hugo.lv, developed by the Latvian IT company Tilde, which translates e-services available in Latvia into various languages, and has been used successfully by multiple foreign visitors to Latvia during the country's presidency at the Council of the European Union.

"Digitization of Europe is one of the goals of the Latvian presidency," said Gerhards. "We hope that, in conclusion of our presidency, the European Commission will be able to adopt a new concept of digital single market."

The summit in Riga brings together 350 delegates from across Europe to draw up a strategic action plan for the multilingual digital single market and agree on specific measures to arrive at a vision of the digital single market.