The stock of orders is still on a very high level. By comparison to the time before COVID-19, unfilled orders in December 2022 were 30.8 per cent higher than in December 2019. This strong increase arose significantly from supply chain problems, which affected big parts of the industrial production particularly between the middle of the year 2021 until the middle of 2022 and thus caused an orders’ bottleneck. With the decreasing shortage in material, new orders and production align more and more.

In December 2022, Germany’s real stock of orders in manufacturing increased by 1.2 per cent as compared to December 2021, according to provisional results of the Federal Statistical Office. The country’s price adjusted stock of orders in manufacturing was 0.4 per cent lower in December 2022 than in November 2022 on a seasonally and calendar adjusted basis.

Unfilled domestic orders were up 0.1 per cent in December 2022 from November 2022, whereas the stock of foreign orders was down 0.7 per cent, as per Destatis.

The stock of orders rose by 2.1 per cent for manufacturers of intermediate goods. In the consumer goods sector, the stock of orders was 0.1 per cent higher than in the previous month.

The range of the stock of orders went up to 7.4 months in December 2022 (November 2022: 7.3 months). The range was 3.8 months for producers of intermediate goods (November 2022: 3.7 months) and 3.4 months for consumer goods (November 2022: also 3.4 months).

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (DP)