“In some cases, the lack of demand requires our member companies to make painful adjustments,” says Dr. Markus Heering, Managing Director of the VDMA Printing and Paper Technology Association.
In the past year, the situation has dramatically worsened due to decreasing business in China. While printing and paper technology of approx. Euro 641 million was shipped from Germany to China during the first eleven months of the previous year, the export volume in the first eleven months of 2014 dropped to Euro 493 million.
“Chinese manufacturers tell us that they, too, have big sales problems in their home market,” Heering explains, adding that they increasingly switch to neighbouring countries in South East Asia, which then results in stronger competitive pressure there.
With the pulling force of the Chinese market diminishing, Europe and the USA increasingly come to the fore for the German suppliers of printing and paper technology.
“In 2014, too, Europe remained by far the most important market for our member companies,“ Heering stresses, making plain that the total of exports to Turkey, France, Poland, Russia, the UK, Italy and Switzerland alone exceeded one billion Euros during the first eleven months of the past year. Amounting to Euro 1.03 billion Euro, they were significantly higher than the total of exports to the two largest single markets of China (Euro 493 million) and the USA (Euro 425 million).
As a result, the export of printing and paper technology to the USA was only approximately Euro 70 million lower than that to China last year.
One year earlier, the difference between these markets was still Euro 250 million.
VDMA (Verband Deutscher Maschinen- und Anlagenbau, German Engineering Federation) represents over 3,100 mostly medium-sized companies in the capital goods industry, making it the largest industry association in Europe.
