There are enough new machines: The manufacturers are currently presenting the heaviest equipment as well as highly complex and digitized special tools at the Bauma in Munich, the world’s largest trade fair for construction equipment. It’s quite possible, however, that all the cranes and tippers, excavators and concrete pumps will have to wait a little longer before they can actually be used – at least that’s what it seems like they’re not really needed right now.
Because construction is feeling the full force of the universal crisis of rapid inflation, rising interest rates, expensive energy and supply problems. Although the sum of new orders for the industry grew in August – but only at first glance. Adjusted for price effects, however, construction companies and craft businesses received six percent fewer new orders than in July, according to the Federal Statistical Office announced on Tuesday. The comparison to the previous year is even more drastic: Price-adjusted, there were even 15.6 percent more orders.
The weakness of the construction industry with its 2.6 million employees is now growing into a real crisis. Because business was not only weak in the summer, but also over the entire year to date, adjusted for inflation effects, incoming orders were well below the previous year’s value – by 5.2 percent so far. Hardly anyone in construction believes that things will soon get better: This is how the companies of the recent Ifo business climate survey not only is their current situation worse than it has been for a long time, but above all the prospects have been assessed as gloomier for months than at any time since the survey began in 1991.
There are good reasons for the bad mood. For example, the number of building permits for new apartments has been falling for four months. At the same time, more and more long-approved projects are being postponed or canceled entirely by builders and project developers. Another recent survey by the Munich Ifo Institute showed that orders placed with almost every fifth construction company are canceled again. The dozens of cranes set up and exhibited at Bauma are therefore probably the only thing that is currently growing into the sky on the exhibition grounds.