I do not know how many of you know it but I have my own company here in Berlin and we are working in connection with two of the bigger German industries which are the automotive as well as the chemical. For this reason I have a small finger on the pulse of the German industry.
The only thing I can say is that 2013 is looking really bad here in Germany. I am certain that the big companies are doing fairly to very well but for one reason or the other they are keeping a tight grip on their wallet just like they did back in 2009. Then it was fully understandable because they were uncertain about the future but today I find it more strange. The big companies have in most cases trimmed their organisations, they laid off the excess / less desired personnel, they went back to core business and should have very little problems today to keep things running. I do not even think that the sales have dropped that much... Usually the big companies are one budget period later in their response which means that they are now and have the entire Spring responded to something that occurred during Autumn but most companies had then serious profits. Maybe we now see the response to the messages about China slowing as well as the American fiscal cliff. Those are the only things that comes into my mind.
Either way... companies around me are going insolvent. We have also been hit by this since some of those companies have large bills that they should have paid to us but they just cannot... So... for my own company to stay liquid I have been forced to cut my salary in half and therefore my future stock investment is being "brought into" my own company with the decreased salary. I will still keep looking for investments and I will still continue to make analysis of interesting companies.
As I said I do not think that the big companies are doing bad. They just tried to protect themselves for what they thought would be a tough time. I therefore think that they will go seriously "shopping" during Autumn because they will have a lot of money in the coffers but little new things to show on the market and machines and new parts are always needed.
The question is... how many small companies will manage to bridge the period until the big companies open their wallets again? I know that we will survive even without getting paid by those insolvent companies but we were also forced to make the salary cut to accomplish that so with this bootstrapping maybe some of our competitors will disappear and we will get even more things to do especially in 2014!
Anyone else out there with their own small companies (also outside of Germany and Europe is of interest!) that have felt that Spring 2013 has been bad for business?
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