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Mercedes plant in Baden-Württemberg: Waiting times are long, especially in the automotive industry
Photo: Sebastian Gollnow / DPA
More and more unfinished business: The order backlog in German industry is thicker than it has been for at least six years.
This was announced by the Federal Statistical Office.
In August, the order backlog increased by 1.7 percent compared to the previous month.
It has risen steadily since June 2020 and has now "reached its highest level since the statistics were introduced in January 2015".
However, many of the orders cannot be served immediately.
Orders grew significantly faster than sales.
Even in August, when incoming orders fell by 7.7 percent compared to the previous month, they still slightly exceeded sales and thus increased the order backlog.
Open orders from within Germany increased by 2.0 percent from July to August and those from abroad by 1.6 percent.
Compared to February 2020, the month before the restrictions caused by the corona pandemic in Germany, the number was 21.7 percent higher.
Demand is recovering, raw materials remain scarce
Another reason for the rapid growth in orders is that industry demand has recovered since the end of the first corona lockdown. Production, on the other hand, started much more slowly. There were delivery difficulties, especially for important intermediate products such as semiconductors, and raw materials such as steel are also in short supply. That also increased the order cushion. The automotive industry in particular suffers from the lack of chips. Most recently, the auditing and consulting company PwC calculated that up to eleven million fewer cars will be produced and sold worldwide by the end of 2021.
But the auto industry is not the only one affected: the inventory of manufacturers of intermediate goods rose by 1.5 percent in August, and that of manufacturers of capital goods by 2.1 percent.
In the consumer goods segment, however, the order backlog was 5.1 percent below the previous month.
The so-called range of the order backlog is also at a record high.
In August it was 7.3 months.
The value indicates how many months the companies would theoretically have to produce in order to process the existing orders, assuming sales remained the same without new orders.
jlk / dpa / Reuters
