In the German industry, orders are piling up higher than ever in view of the production bottlenecks.

The order backlog grew in September by 2.4 percent compared to the previous month, as the Federal Statistical Office announced on Wednesday.

It has risen continuously since June 2020 and has now reached the highest level since these statistics began in January 2015.

Orders have been developing faster than sales for months now. “The companies in the manufacturing sector received more new orders than they could process,” the statisticians summarized the development. “One of the main reasons for the high order backlog is likely to be delivery bottlenecks for preliminary products.” For example, car manufacturers suffer from a lack of chips, which is why they cannot build as many vehicles despite strong demand.

"The order books are bursting at the seams because production, which has been throttled due to delivery bottlenecks, cannot keep up with demand," said DekaBank economist Andreas Scheuerle.

“Demand is building up here, which will lead to additional impulses in the coming year if the delivery bottlenecks are resolved.” However, this is likely to be a little lower than the order backlog suggests, as it should also contain some multiple orders.

"In order to receive a preliminary product at least once, companies have ordered it from several suppliers," said Scheuerle.

Record also for range

The range of the order backlog has also increased further and reached 7.4 months in September - also a new high since data was recorded in 2015 process existing orders.

Open orders from within Germany increased by 1.2 percent from August to September, while those from abroad even increased by 3.1 percent.

Compared to February 2020, the month before the restrictions caused by the corona pandemic in Germany, the total order backlog is now 24.6 percent higher.

Among the manufacturers of capital goods, it rose by 2.7 percent.

This is mainly due to the manufacturers of motor vehicles and motor vehicle parts (plus 5.9 percent) and machine manufacturers (plus 3.9 percent).

In the case of intermediate goods, the inventory increased by 1.8 percent.

In the consumer goods segment, on the other hand, there was a decline of 0.5 percent.