The chairman of one of Germany’s top manufacturing companies has issued a stark warning to the public, suggesting that the country—due to soaring costs that have come about as a result of sky-high energy prices—is becoming far less attractive to businesses and therefore may be on the brink of deindustrialization.
While speaking to the German Press Agency (DPA), Nikolas Stihl, the chairman of the German chainsaw manufacturing company Stihl, suggested that Germany is becoming increasingly unappealing as a location for entrepreneurs, businesses, and industrial manufacturing, so much so that could ultimately lead to the deindustrialization of the country, which is regarded as the economic engine of Europe, the Berlin-based newspaper Die Welt reports.
“The danger of deindustrialization cannot be dismissed out of hand. The German location could eventually reach a tipping point with a strong negative impact on the willingness to be entrepreneurial in this country,” Stihl, who chairs the Stihl Group Advisory and Supervisory Board, told the state-run media outlet, adding that this point would be reached when companies are unable to produce competitively in Germany.
Despite noting that Germany has always been a relatively expensive place to do business, Stihl said that his company so far has managed to cope with the costs. “But the developments in the area of bureaucracy, the cost burden, the lack of investments that we urgently need—this means that the location conditions in this country are getting a little worse every year,” he added.
Stihl lamented that for too long, decades in fact, too many time, money, and energy was invested in consumption in Germany and not enough in the country itself.
“And we are now feeling the consequences. We are not renewing our infrastructure enough, building too little and not innovative enough We are watching as the most important competitors in the world—such as the US and China—overtake us left and right,” he said, adding that neither the former grand coalition, comprised of the CDU/CSU and SDP, or the traffic light coalition have properly addressed the problem.
The industrialist’s warning come two months after the German Retail Trade Federation (HDE), an organization that represents the needs and interests of the country’s retail sector, gave a dire warning to to Vice-Chancellor and Economic Minister Robert Habeck, writing in a letter that 16,000 businesses are on the verge bankruptcy this year, and referred to the predicament as “existentially threatening, as The European Conservative previously reported.
Months earlier, over the summer, German Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP) warned that an economic crisis, the likes of which the country has not seen in many decades, was on the horizon as a result of skyrocketing energy prices, high inflation, and ongoing supply-chain issues.
