Stuttgart (dpa/lsw) – A slump in orders in the final quarter of 2022 caused a drop in machine and plant manufacturers in Baden-Württemberg. The order intake was ultimately price-adjusted (real) by seven percent below the previous year’s value, as the regional association of the VDMA announced on Thursday in Stuttgart. In the last month of last year, companies posted an 18 percent drop in orders compared to the same month last year.
Managing Director Dietrich Birk explained: “Considering that the companies faced numerous challenges in 2022, the result is quite impressive.” The bottlenecks in deliveries are gradually easing, even if a “normal situation” is far from being reached. The decline in incoming orders in Germany was ten percent and abroad six percent compared to the previous year.
Birk went on to say that the companies could now use the still unusually high order backlog of almost 12 months to cushion the decline in incoming orders.
According to earlier information, the Federal Association of the VDMA is expecting a slight real decline in production of two percent for the current year. Because the environment for the export-oriented German key industry with more than one million employees in Germany remains challenging: Growth in the important sales market China is weakening, the war in Ukraine is keeping energy prices at a high level, and according to economists general inflation will only fall slowly and the rate hikes by the central banks make investments more expensive.
