While German companies view the data business as promising, more than a third of them see Germany as a laggard at best in a global comparison.

This is the result of a representative survey by the digital industry association Bitkom.

While 29 percent of the 600 companies surveyed already see the country lagging behind in the race for the so-called data economy, 13 percent are of the opinion that Germany is one of the pioneers;

four percent believe it is a leader.

Stephen Finsterbusch

Editor in Business.

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“We have to rethink so that Germany can actually play a leading role in the data economy,” said Bernhard Rohleder, CEO of Bitkom.

“We are in a phase where new, data-driven business models are emerging worldwide.

Politicians must give the freedom to allow such innovations to develop in Germany as well.”

Data as a new resource

The global business with data is already estimated at around 200 billion dollars a year.

The collection and use of data will change completely as a result of the digitization of entire industries.

The amount of data alone that is generated by sensors on machines of all kinds will increase rapidly.

US corporations like Google, Microsoft or Meta see in data what was once the oil for industrial societies.

China has declared digital data as one of the basic production factors of the economy, along with land, capital and labour.

The Europeans want to keep up here and are developing technical initiatives as well as binding legal frameworks.

According to Bitkom's general manager, a lot has happened in recent years, such as the Europe-wide initiative for shared data rooms called Gaia-X.

But well-known hurdles to the rapid implementation of data-driven innovations have by no means been eliminated.

The companies surveyed perceive data protection as one of the biggest obstacles.

Data protection as a hurdle

The protection of data is correct and important.

But neither Europe nor Germany have uniform rules of the game.

In Germany alone there are around 200 pieces of legislation - and they vary from state to state.

In the Bitkom survey, two thirds of the companies stated that data protection is an obstacle to new business models.

"In Europe and also within Germany, we need, above all, uniform data protection with uniform interpretations," says Rohleder.

It should be taken into account that a ban on the use of data increasingly means that valuable offers cannot be developed and marketed in Germany.

With so-called data spaces such as Gaia-X, Europe is currently developing new possibilities for using data that go far beyond the previous digital platforms.

In such virtual spaces, companies agree on common rules and procedures for handling and exchanging their data.

This should enable, standardize and simplify decentralized access to data.

In its most recent annual report, the Commission of Experts for Research and Innovation described the development of such data rooms as the basis for a future competitive German economy.

In the Bitkom survey, however, it turned out that around a quarter of the companies had never heard of these data rooms.

Another quarter has heard of them, but don't know what to do with them.

At most, 16 percent are in the picture, only 3 percent have become active so far.