Significant drop in sales in the Corona year 2020
As the figures show, the Hessian M + E industry has had a significant drop in sales since March due to the Corona crisis. Above all, the manufacturers of motor vehicles and parts hit it in April and May with heavy losses of over three quarters of the previous year’s sales.
The decline in sales for the first three quarters of 2020 is over 12 percent compared to the previous year. In addition, the pandemic has exacerbated the negative development of the future indicator “incoming orders” for two years. In April and May, the new orders were over a third below the previous year’s level.
The slump in demand is already evident in falling employment figures. Since the peak in September 2018, employment has fallen by around 12,000 jobs to 208,000. The majority of these lost jobs are mainly due to the general economic downturn and structural change.
However, Corona means that the negative trend will continue and lead to further job cuts. As the survey showed, the number of employees will decrease by 4.7 percent according to the expectations of the companies. Extrapolated to the entire Hessian M + E industry, a further 10,000 jobs will be lost by spring.
The mood and expectations are gloomy
“The mood in Hesse’s largest industry has deteriorated further compared to autumn 2019, and the expectations for spring 2021 are bleak,” said Hessenmetall CEO Wolf Matthias Mang, summarizing the results of the survey.
152 member companies with a total of 41,000 employees took part. 37 percent of the companies rate their general business situation as bad, only 17 percent as good. And 85 percent do not expect any improvement for the next six months. This combination of bad sentiment and little prospect of improvement runs through all relevant operational indicators with almost identical values: incoming orders, sales, exports and earnings.
source https://pledgetimes.com/hessens-companies-are-concerned-about-the-year-2021/
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