Berlin (Reuters) – In view of the production bottlenecks, orders are piling up in German industry.
The stock grew in November by 1.5 percent compared to the previous month and is now higher than at any time since the beginning of the 2015 data series, as the Federal Statistical Office announced on Wednesday. Since June 2020, the companies have been receiving more new orders than they have been able to process. “A major reason for this is likely to be delivery bottlenecks for primary products,” the statisticians explained. For example, car manufacturers suffer from a lack of semiconductors, which is why they cannot build as many vehicles as actually possible, despite strong demand. Compared to February 2020, the month before the restrictions due to the corona pandemic began in Germany, the order backlog is now 27.4 percent higher after calendar and seasonal adjustment.
Open orders from Germany increased by 0.8 percent in November, those from abroad by as much as 1.8 percent. The stock of manufacturers of intermediate goods increased by 1.5 percent, among producers of capital goods by 1.4 percent and in the area of consumer goods by as much as 2.5 percent.
The range of orders on hand has also increased further. It also reached a new high in November at 7.6 months. The range of 10.8 months is particularly high for manufacturers of capital goods such as machines and vehicles. It indicates how many months the companies would theoretically have to produce without new incoming orders if sales remained the same in order to process the existing orders.
Industrial companies will work off the mountain of orders by ramping up their production if the material bottlenecks ease significantly from early summer with falling corona numbers, Commerzbank chief economist Jrg Krmer expects. The Ifo Institute even sees the pent-up order backlog as “a significant upside risk that could significantly fuel the overall economic recovery process in the next two years”.