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German growth offers lifeline for Euro（视频）

中国日报网 2012-08-22 10:44

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Dieter Burmester is passionate about his work and his hobby: music. His Berlin-based company produces audio equipment that retails for many thousands of dollars, and can be found in Porsche and Bugatti cars.

So what has been Burmester’s experience of the euro crisis? “What crisis? Is there a crisis? In so far as I know, industry is working very well at the moment, we know it from the car builders, we know it from big companies like Siemens or Bayer. And our own situation is also very nice, we have increased turnover this year,” he said.

Burmester is an example of a German Mittelstand or medium-sized company. It is fully owned by its founder and has only 50 employees; it does not survive on big loans; yet it competes with global giants.

“I believe to build up such a company is extremely difficult, but in Germany we have a nice situation. The infrastructure, that we have suppliers, that we have well-educated employees, and very committed employees is a great situation," Burmester said.

The German economy grew by 0.3 percent in the past quarter. Other Eurozone countries managed stagnation at best, severe contraction at worst. Analyst Ferdinand Fichtner of the German Institute for Economic Research says Germany’s resilience is rooted in Mittelstand companies.

“They are the backbone of the German economy. Roughly two-thirds of employment in Germany is in those SME enterprises and what is probably even more important, it’s around 80 percent of industrial trainees that are employed in the Mittelstand,” Fichtner said.

Six-hour from Berlin by high speed train is Stuttgart - home to big names like Porsche and Mercedes. Here in 1870s Benz and Nicolas Auto developed the modern automobile. The German car-making industry is now the biggest in Europe.

Brands like Mercedes are the ring of blazes of the German economy. But it’s not all about big companies. Inside a car like this, there are many parts supplied by small and medium sized companies, many of them highly innovative in their fields.

Back in Berlin, the address labels in Burmester’s warehouse indicate a growing source of income: Asia. German exports to countries outside the EU soared by 20 percent in June compared with a year earlier. Exports to fellow eurozone nations fell three-percent.

Analysts say German exporters have benefited from a weak currency since joining the euro.

Bus polls show around half of Germans want to return to the Deutschmark. Despite the euro crisis, that figure has remained largely unchanged in recent years.

If Germany avoids the recession affecting the rest of the Eurozone, analysts say it will be thanks largely to the Mittelstand companies.

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