Robert Mayr, head of the IT company Datev, rates the economic situation as relaxed, but sees major deficits in digitization. The software group itself is happy about good business.
The corona pandemic is causing less damage to the German economy than expected. “In the course of the current, progressive easing of the corona measures, the risk situation has eased significantly in many areas,” said Robert Mayr, CEO of Datev. The feared bankruptcy wave has not materialized and the risk of bankruptcies has been decreasing rapidly for several weeks, especially among medium-sized companies. According to a survey by Datev, the number of companies at risk of bankruptcy has halved since March. Without state aid, however, the situation would look worse, Mayr said and appealed to the companies to be paid out as quickly as possible.
So far, the end of the insolvency notification obligation, which was temporarily suspended due to the pandemic, has not led to an increase in company bankruptcies, said the Datev boss, referring to data that the company regularly collects with the help of 433 tax consultants and auditors. So two professions that are close to small and medium-sized companies in particular. The cooperatively organized Datev produces software and offers IT services for their law firms. And that with growing economic success.
Last year the company generated sales of 1.156 billion euros, 5.1 percent more than in 2019. “That is great,” said Mayr. The operating result climbed by eleven million to 71.6 million euros. Business will continue to be good in 2021. In the first half of the year, sales increased by 4.4 percent. During this period, the Datev gained 39,000 new customers. While the business with workshops and seminars declined due to the pandemic in 2020, cloud-based applications in particular would find great sales, according to the CEO. With 8,200 employees, Datev is one of the largest software houses in Germany. In the past year, the company created around 180 new jobs.
According to Robert Mayr, the pandemic has also revealed weaknesses in Germany in terms of digitization. “Politics and administration are still too stuck in the Prussian administrative system,” he said. In other words: Every process is split up into small sub-steps and controlled accordingly. “This is real engineering from the early phase of industrialization,” said Mayr. “But unfortunately this system no longer fits in with today’s fast-paced, networked, digital world.” This was shown, for example, by the health authorities, whose contact tracking was analog, cumbersome and correspondingly slow. Mayr also complained about “the digitization problems in the education sector”, but also “inadequate digital infrastructure”, which prevents citizens and companies from communicating quickly with authorities. Germany urgently needs “a forward-looking digitization policy”.