Raw materials: Material shortages in industry are increasing - especially in one industry

Berlin. The material shortages in German industry increased again somewhat in September and are becoming a problem especially in the electrical industry. 14.6 percent of companies reported missing preliminary products, after 13.3 percent in August, as the Munich Ifo Institute announced on Monday in its survey. “There can be no talk of a nationwide increase in supply bottlenecks in the industry,” said Ifo survey chief Klaus Wohlrabe. “In individual industries, however, missing intermediate products are becoming a bigger problem again.”

Supply remains particularly tight among manufacturers of data processing equipment and electronic and optical products. The proportion of companies with material shortages rose from 33.2 to 37.8 percent. “Especially in parts of the electrical industry, strong demand is met by a strained supply of materials,” said Wohlrabe. “Missing preliminary products could increasingly become a bottleneck there.”

This comes at an inopportune time, as the electrical industry has become the economic engine of German industry. One reason for this is digitalization. Artificial intelligence is also an important driver here. The industry relies on semiconductors. They are currently very popular on the world market, scarce and therefore expensive.

The situation also worsened again in the chemical industry. There, 18.0 percent of companies reported material shortages, after 12.5 percent in August. In mechanical engineering, the share increased slightly from 14.9 to 16.3 percent.

However, the situation has eased significantly in metal production and processing: here the share fell from 21.1 to 14.2 percent. For manufacturers of electrical equipment, it fell slightly from 29.5 to 27.4 percent, but remained at a high level. In the automotive industry, the supply situation remained almost unchanged at 8.9 percent.