Berlin (Reuters) – German industry’s order cushion thinned for the fifth month in a row in November.
The order backlog fell by 0.7 percent compared to the previous month, as the Federal Statistical Office announced on Wednesday. There was a decrease in open orders both from home and abroad. Compared to the same month last year, there was even a decline of 5.7 percent.
“The order backlog continues to melt away, and with it the chance of an economic recovery,” explained the chief economist at the private bank Hauck Aufhäuser Lamp, Alexander Krüger. Because new business has weakened recently: it fell 4.5 percent lower from September to November 2023 than from June to August.
The negative development in inventories is largely due to the automotive industry: there was an above-average decline of 3.7 percent compared to the previous month. “Historically high order backlogs accumulated in the automotive industry in particular in the years 2020 to 2022 due to delivery bottlenecks,” explained the statisticians, for example with a view to the shortage of semiconductors during the corona pandemic. They have been falling again since February 2023. “Despite the sharp decline over the course of the year, the order books in the automotive industry are still at a high level from a longer-term perspective,” it added.
The range of orders on hand in industry remained constant in November at an average of 6.9 months. The range indicates how many months the companies would theoretically have to produce in order to process the existing orders with constant sales without new business. For manufacturers of intermediate goods, the range remained at 3.8 months; for producers of capital goods it fell to 9.3 (October: 9.5) months. For consumer goods manufacturers it was also unchanged at 3.4 months.
(Report by Rene Wagner, edited by Christian Götz. If you have any questions, please contact our editorial team at [email protected])