Despite the current crisis Germany is very attractive for industrial businesses. It is also believed that Germany will keep this attraction in future. This was revealed by a survey carried out by the Association of German chambers of industry and commerce (DIHK). In the course of this survey about 700 industrial businesses and businesses close to industry were interviewed. Even though German industrial companies think that in the long run the world market share of industrial products made in Germany is going to decrease, they nevertheless expect that in ten years time more than fifty percent of their output will be produced within Germany.
The rest is expected to be produced by international suppliers or production sites of German industrial companies outside Germany.
Assessing several aspects of an industrial location most respondents gave the best mark to the “availability of suppliers and service providers” (mark 2.1). Good marks were also given to the German IT infrastructure (2.3), legal certainty (2.4), availability of business surface (2.5) and social peace (2.6).
A relatively bad mark (3.6) was given to economic policies made in Germany because of too many regulations with regard to environmental, social or consumer-related issues imposed from Berlin or Brussels. These, according to respondents, stood in the way of a strengthening and modernization of Germany as an industrial location.
The businesses interviewed also believe that the German taxation law was not competitive given that it was too complicated and contained structural flaws.
Dissatisfactory marks were also given to high energy costs and inflexible labour laws (mark 4.1).
As a consequence of the negative points mentioned above 20% of the businesses interviewed plan to relocate part of their production abroad. Among businesses with more than 500 employees this figure amounts to 40% due to the advanced internationalization of such businesses.
All findings of the survey in question are available for free-of-charge download. 