Dusseldorf (Reuters) – In August, incoming orders in German mechanical engineering remained at the previous year’s level.
Six percent fewer orders came in from Germany, but two percent more from abroad, the industry association VDMA announced on Tuesday. “The bottom line is that incoming orders stagnated in August. In view of the never-ending bottlenecks, price increases and imponderables, that is more than impressive,” explained VDMA chief economist Ralph Wiechers. While demand from euro countries increased by 23 percent, orders from non-euro countries fell by five percent.
In the three-month period from June to August, which was less affected by fluctuations, orders fell by eight percent; from Germany by eleven percent and from abroad by six percent.
The industry with around one million employees is considered the backbone of the German economy. It has been suffering from material bottlenecks for a long time and increasingly from a lack of staff. Added to this is the Ukraine war, which is causing uncertainty. After mini-growth in 2022, the branch of industry therefore expects a decline in production in the coming year.
(Report by Anneli Palmen, edited by Ralf Banser; if you have any questions, please contact our editorial team at [email protected] (for politics and the economy) or [email protected] (for companies and markets).)
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