After cutting back on delivery bottlenecks this year, Germany’s machine builders are looking confidently to 2022. “We are going into the coming year with a good dose of optimism and are assuming that the pre-Corona level will be reached,” said the president of the VDMA industry association, Karl Haeusgen . According to the VDMA, production this year will increase by around seven percent to around 219 billion euros compared to the previous year. In September a plus of ten percent was expected. “We could have produced more if the various delivery bottlenecks hadn’t been so persistent,” explained Haeusgen.
Thanks to well-filled order books, the export-oriented German key industry could grow faster in the coming year than initially thought. The association is currently anticipating an increase in production of seven percent instead of the previous five percent. In the corona crisis year 2020, production fell by almost twelve percent.
In the first ten months of the current year, orders rose sharply by 34 percent, while production rose in the same period, weaker than expected, by 7.2 percent in real terms. Raw materials and intermediate products such as semiconductors are currently in short supply. Many machine-builders are therefore unable to process orders at the usual pace.
In a survey by the association at the beginning of December, in which 521 member companies took part, 84 percent stated that they still felt impairments in the supply chain. There is mainly a lack of electronic components and metals. An extensive easing of the situation is not expected until the second quarter of 2022 at the earliest; for electronic components, the companies do not expect this before the third quarter.
Despite a slight decrease in the number of employees in Germany by 1.9 percent to around 1.01 million in the second Corona year, the mechanical engineering companies remain the largest industrial employer in Germany, according to the information. According to the VDMA, 67 percent of the companies are planning to increase their permanent workforce in the coming year. However, the shortage of skilled workers causes problems. The topic is a very big challenge in the medium term, said Haeusgen.
The association is concerned about the increasing tensions in the relationship between China and the USA. In addition, the Chinese government is increasingly striving for technological self-sufficiency in key technologies. “This tends to make the business environment more difficult for foreign companies in China,” said Haeusgen. Alongside Europe and the USA, the country is one of the most important sales markets for machines “Made in Germany”.