2024-10-07 12:05:34
In the first half of 2024, German car manufacturers suffered a significant decline in sales. This has an impact on the most important German industry and its workforce.
The weak sales of German car manufacturers led to a decline in sales of 4.7 percent to 269.5 billion euros in the first half of the year, the Federal Statistical Office announced on Monday. In the same period last year, BMW, Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz achieved record sales of 282.6 billion euros thanks to increased prices.
With a 25.2 percent share of total industrial sales, the automotive industry remained the industry with the highest sales in the first half of the year. The decline in sales affected all areas: Sales for bodies, bodies and trailers fell by 11.6 percent, for parts and accessories for motor vehicles by 5.4 percent and in the production of motor vehicles and engines the decline was 4.3 percent .
Foreign business made up a large part of the industry’s sales, at 70 percent. Around 1.7 million new cars worth 68.4 billion euros were exported from Germany in the first half of 2024, meaning the number only fell slightly by 0.3 percent compared to the first half of 2023. Domestic sales fell from 84.5 billion euros in the same period last year to 80.5 billion euros in the first six months of this year.
In the first half of the year, car manufacturers without suppliers employed around 773,000 people, which corresponds to a decline of 0.8 percent compared to the previous year. For comparison: At the end of the first half of 2019 there were still around 834,000 employees.
Both the federal government and research institutes assume that the overall economic situation will gradually improve in the coming year. However, the prerequisite for this is that the growth initiative planned by the traffic light government with tax improvements, work incentives and a reduction in bureaucracy takes off. So far only a fraction of the planned measures have been implemented, so “there is still a great need for action,” explained Economics Minister Robert Habeck.