Automotive & Manufacturing Editor, German Business Review
Lukas Schneider covers carmakers, suppliers and industrial production, following orders, factory utilisation and cash generation across the manufacturing cycle.
Coverage prioritises Destatis, the Bundesbank, federal regulators, company reports and dated regional statistics. Estimates and company guidance are presented as such.
Lukas approaches the automotive sector as a manufacturing system. Carmaker results, supplier orders, factory utilisation, inventories and capital spending are read together, because a headline change in vehicle demand can take very different forms across the value chain.
His coverage also follows the transition costs of electrification and software. He looks for evidence of where investment is occurring, which plants or suppliers are affected and whether management guidance is visible in production and cash generation rather than treating strategic targets as completed outcomes.
BMW targets a 3% to 5% automotive EBIT margin in 2028 before returning to 8% to 10% early next decade. Its route combines fewer variants, regional products, local production, AI and leaner management.
Germany wants UniCredit to protect Commerzbank's Frankfurt base, capital and Mittelstand lending as it approaches control. The demands show that the takeover is being judged less as a bank merger than as infrastructure for German industry.
Evonik has rejected a reported €10.3 billion approach from BASF as too low. The strategic logic of scale is visible, but shareholders, labour and overlapping assets will demand a price for creating a national chemicals champion.
Berlin will cut fuel taxation through December and is considering a temporary price cap for 2027. The package cushions an external shock, but repeated intervention risks delaying the structural work of reducing transport exposure to oil.
ECB analysis shows China buying fewer of the manufactured goods Europe sells while exporting a more similar product mix into third markets. Germany's machinery-heavy economy faces the sharpest overlap.
German corporate insolvencies reached a 13-year high in the first half of 2026, with 12,812 filings. We examine which sectors are under the most pressure.
GSK plans to close its Dresden vaccine factory in summer 2027 as demand for egg-based flu vaccines declines, putting 641 German jobs at risk.
The UAE has announced €40 billion of planned investment in Germany, including roughly 1GW of new data centres and major industrial and energy partnerships.
Germany plans €117.5 billion of investment in 2027 as defence, infrastructure and new borrowing reshape federal fiscal policy.
Germany and the UAE are deepening cooperation through AI, energy and investment agreements worth several billion dollars. We examine the industrial logic.
A sourced profile of Herrenknecht, the Schwanau engineering company that describes itself as the world market leader in mechanised tunnelling solutions.
A profile of GRIMME, the Lower Saxony family business that describes itself as world market leader in potato technology.
A profile of Krones, the Neutraubling engineering group that describes itself as global market leader in beverage filling and packaging technology.
A profile of ebm-papst, the Mulfingen family business that describes itself as world market leader in fans and drives.
A data-led guide to Germany's machinery and equipment industry, covering employment, sales, exports and why the sector is central to the hidden-champion model.
Volkswagen's Future Plan 2030 points to about 50,000 positions of group-wide workforce adjustment. We explain what is approved, what remains uncertain and what it means for German plants.
Volkswagen's Future Plan 2030 targets 9 million vehicles, a 9% operating margin and about 50,000 additional role reductions. Four German plants face unresolved allocation risk.
German manufacturing orders rose 2.5% in July 2026, but fell 1.4% excluding large orders. Automotive orders dropped 12.5%, Destatis says.
The ifo industry's July expectations rose sharply, but job-cut pressure and poor present conditions remained.
Group deliveries rose outside China while the first-half operating result fell about 12%, according to Volkswagen.
German manufacturers need Chinese demand, but local competitors are moving faster in software, EV pricing and product cycles.
Registrations measure demand by powertrain; plants, exports and model allocation determine domestic production economics.
Monthly electric-car registrations can move sharply with incentives, fleet demand and model launches, so one month rarely defines the trend.
Infineon opened its €5 billion Smart Power Fab months ahead of schedule in July 2026. The plant's relevance had expanded from EVs and renewables to the power systems required by AI data centres.
EV production is spread across legacy plants and converted sites, creating very different cost structures and labour challenges.
Delivery changes alone do not show local joint-venture earnings, pricing or the cost of product renewal.
Few German cities have a corporate anchor as powerful as Volkswagen; that makes product, software and factory decisions unusually important for the local economy.
Bosch, ZF, Continental, Mahle and other suppliers must fund new technology while legacy component demand declines unevenly.
Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Bosch and a dense supplier base create engineering scale, but concentration magnifies the cost of an automotive downturn.
Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and BMW remain industrial giants, but software, China exposure and electric-vehicle economics increasingly separate their performance.
Combustion, hybrid and electric programmes overlap, forcing suppliers to fund old capacity and new tools at the same time.
Volkswagen's Zukunft agreement targets more than 35,000 fewer German positions and 734,000 units of lower production capacity by 2030. What it means for German factory economics.
BMW's new Debrecen factory prepared to start iX3 series production with fossil-free operations, digital integration and on-site high-voltage battery assembly. It was the first clean-sheet factory built around Neue Klasse.
Deutsche Telekom and Nvidia announced an industrial AI cloud for Germany built around 10,000 Nvidia chips. The project made data sovereignty, manufacturing AI and domestic compute capacity part of the same commercial proposition.
Rheinmetall's 2024 sales rose 36% to €9.75 billion and operating profit climbed 61%. A €55 billion backlog suggested rearmament was no longer a short-term demand spike.
Mercedes-Benz set out to cut production costs by 10% by 2027 and reduce global passenger-car capacity toward 2.0 to 2.2 million units. The plan acknowledged that weaker China demand and slower EV adoption required a leaner industrial base.
SAP ended 2024 with €18.1 billion of current cloud backlog and said half of fourth-quarter cloud order entry included AI use cases. The results moved AI from product narrative into contracted enterprise demand.
Schwarz Digits and Google agreed to build sovereign workplace offerings around Google Workspace, STACKIT storage and client-side encryption. The partnership challenged the idea that European sovereignty required replacing US software entirely.
Aleph Alpha's PhariaAI launch broadened the company from proprietary language models into an enterprise AI operating system built around controllability, explainability and deployment choice.
Germany's financial regulator lifted N26's customer-growth restriction from June 2024 after the bank said it had invested more than €100 million in compliance and infrastructure. The decision reopened growth but changed the economics of how it had to scale.
DeepL raised $300 million at a $2 billion valuation while serving more than 100,000 business customers. The round rewarded a narrower AI strategy built around paid enterprise workflows rather than mass-market chatbot usage.
DeepL's enterprise writing assistant extended the Cologne company's product beyond translation into drafting and rewriting, while making security and data handling central parts of the pitch.
Rheinmetall's new Lower Saxony ammunition plant was designed for 200,000 artillery shells a year, 1,900 tonnes of explosives and roughly 500 jobs. The investment showed that defence demand had moved beyond order books into new industrial capacity.
SAP's 2024 transformation programme affected roughly 8,000 positions and carried about €2 billion of restructuring cost. The important detail was that headcount was expected to finish the year near its starting level as resources shifted toward cloud and AI.
BMW committed €650 million to transform its historic Munich plant for Neue Klasse production, with all-electric manufacturing planned by the end of 2027. The project tested whether legacy German factories could be reinvented rather than replaced.
Bosch Ventures co-led Aleph Alpha's more than $500 million Series B alongside Schwarz Group companies and IPAI. The investment showed German industrial capital trying to shape an AI stack built around explainability and data control.
Aleph Alpha assembled more than $500 million of commitments from Bosch Ventures, Schwarz Group companies, IPAI and other investors. The round attempted to combine private capital, industrial customers and sovereign infrastructure around a German model provider.
Schwarz Group combined its IT, STACKIT cloud, XM Cyber, e-commerce and digital units into Schwarz Digits with roughly 7,500 employees. The move made technology an external business line rather than only internal infrastructure for Lidl and Kaufland.
Bosch, Infineon and NXP agreed to join TSMC in European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, a planned Dresden fab with capacity of 40,000 300mm wafers a month. The project connected automotive demand with European semiconductor sovereignty.
Infineon's largest-ever single investment targeted power semiconductors and analog/mixed-signal technologies used in vehicles, renewables and industrial systems. The strategy was built around electrification demand rather than leading-edge computing alone.
Deutsche Telekom sold 51% of GD Towers to DigitalBridge and Brookfield at a €17.5 billion enterprise value, receiving more than €10 billion of cash while retaining 49% and long-term access to the network.
Celonis raised a $400 million equity extension at nearly a $13 billion post-money valuation and added a $600 million revolving credit facility, giving the company unusual financing flexibility as technology markets tightened.
N26 raised more than $900 million at a valuation above $9 billion in 2021, with seven million customers and plans to add 1,000 staff. The round priced aggressive international growth just before regulation became the binding constraint.
Mercedes-Benz said it would be ready to go all-electric by the end of the decade where market conditions allowed and planned more than €40 billion of BEV investment from 2022 to 2030.
Celonis raised $1 billion in Series D funding at more than an $11 billion valuation. The round validated the Munich-founded company's effort to expand process mining into a broader execution-management platform.