The situation of the German supplier industry remains tense, as was pointed out recently by industry association ArGeZ (Düsseldorf, Germany; www.argez.de) at its annual press conference. Christian Vietmeyer, spokesperson for the association, said that though sales of the 9,000 or so member companies went up last year by nearly 15% to just under EUR 244 bn, this increase was attributable above all to the significant rise in the costs of energy and raw materials.

This, he added, could only partly be passed on to the customers. All in all, production fell, compared to the previous year, by 2.3% (to 97.4 points), and capacity utilisation declined by 1% to 81.4%.

Especially automotive suppliers are, in the opinion of the association, coming “under increasingly heavy pressure”. Because German car production has fallen drastically in the past ten years by 2 mn units to “just” 3.6 mn cars and vans, suppliers have had to battle with constantly declining call-off figures. On top of that, they were supposedly under enormous cost pressure, which many of the predominantly medium-sized enterprises were unable to escape by shifting their production abroad, Vietmeyer said, and called on the OEMs to show “fairness and partnership”.

Related: German companies feel sandwiched due to cost increases for energy and raw materials

For the ArGeZ segment of engineering plastics products, Michael Weigelt, head of the TecPart (Frankfurt, Germany; www.tecpart.de) association, reported a fall of as much as 3.5% in capacity utilisation to just 76.6%. Additionally, the decline in production of 2.7% was above the minus figure for the association as a whole. On the other hand, Weigelt said the companies are looking more optimistically to the future than they were a year ago. The positive prospects are backed by “solid orderbooks”. Now it was up to the legislator to finally eliminate the cost-related competitive disadvantages being suffered by German companies.

Related: European car component makers report profitability concerns