May 2001 - Nr. 5
Auto Industry Germany’s Biggest
TWIG - Eager customers around the world helped make the auto industry Germany’s second largest employer and largest industry by turnover. Vehicle sales in 2000 amounted to DM 431.2 billion (U.S. $194 billion) last year, the Federal Statistical Bureau reported Thursday (April 19), and accounted for 17 percent of the manufacturing sector’s total revenues. Overall, auto industry sales were up by 8.2 percent last year, exports by 14.1 percent. Export sales, at DM 251 billion ($113 billion), accounted for 58.3 percent of the auto industry’s total turnover; no other branch of German industry, the bureau notes, derives so high a share of its revenues from export sales.
Employment in the auto industry grew much more slowly - 1.6 percent - last year than sales as a result, the Statistical Bureau says, of high worker productivity. With 767,100 men and women on its payrolls, the auto industry ranked second only to the machine tool industry in the size of its work force.
