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Production of car bodies in Munich
Photo: Sven Hoppe / dpa
The order backlog in German industrial companies is getting longer and longer.
According to a survey by the Munich Ifo Institute, the order books are now as full as they have been since the early 1960s, said Commerzbank chief economist Jörg Kramer.
But the companies can't keep up when it comes to processing the orders.
According to the Federal Statistical Office, the number of orders is higher than has ever been measured since the corresponding data series began in January 2015.
Since June 2020, the companies have consistently received more new orders than they have been able to serve.
For manufacturers of machinery and vehicles, the pipeline of commitments is now so large that they could produce for eleven months without winning a single new order if sales remained the same.
"A major reason for this is likely to be delivery bottlenecks," write the statisticians.
The corona pandemic has disrupted supply chains worldwide, which is why many preliminary products and raw materials do not arrive on time.
Car manufacturers, for example, lack microchips.
The bottlenecks are noticeably slowing down the German economy.
According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW), industrial production in 2021 was around twelve percent below the level that would actually have been possible given the high level of incoming orders.
"This corresponds to lost added value of around 70 billion euros," says Nils Jannsen, head of economic activity at the IfW.
Economist Krämer, meanwhile, predicts a rosy future for German industry.
The companies are likely to convert their backlog of orders "into a sharp increase in production if the supply bottlenecks ease with the ebbing Corona wave," he says.
However, it is unclear when things will start to pick up again.
The IfW writes that it is possible that the supply chain problems caused by the Omicron variant will have an effect until 2023.
So far, many experts had predicted that the problems would be resolved in the course of 2022.
ssu/Reuters
