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Comment by ArtTimeInvestor | Hacker News Reader

I would like to learn more about the situation of the German economy.

Is there any industry in Germany that will grow in the coming decade?

Has anything important been developed in Germany in the last decade?

Have there been any big IPOs in Germany in the last decade?

Germany's companies seem to have very low p/e ratios. This means the market expects them to tank. Are there companies in Germany with a high p/e ratio, say over 100? Off the top of my head, I can only think of SAP. A company that I find hard to reason about.

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Anecdote: a friend of mine, a mechanical engineer with master’s degree in automobile engineering from one of the good German Universities ended up working for the biggest German Automakers. Him being the only non German, non White person in his department, had his entire experience be “This in not <insert your country>, this is Germany. We do things a certain way.” He moved to the US after 2 years and worked for Tesla and now Rivian. Not only did he make a bunch of money, but he now gets to work on the new technology. Meanwhile the old company is trying to keep up and stay current with the times.

While it is definitely unfortunate that his origin was involved in this, this is one of two general arguments you hear in Germany and to some degree Switzerland whenever any kind of change is suggested. "We've always done it like this here!" or "We've never done it like this here!" pick one. Where "here" refers to anything from the country down to the department, depending on the topic.

It is the experience of every non-german working in Germany and especially in automotive. I'm white fwiw.

I probably lost years of my life expectancy just working there. In fact I think the best thing that could happen for the european tech sector would be for the german automotive industry to collapse.

The German car industry is completely outdated and very, VERY conservative. This includes Bosch. I would never work there.

The VW board even fired the CEO (Herbert Diess) because he wanted to make too many changes at once. The German car industry is a hopeless case, except maybe BMW.

I'm not disputing that the German economy has issues, but is a large number of companies with a P/E ratio over 100 really a sign of a healthy economy?

Explosive growth can only continue for so long before the bubble bursts.

A high p/e just means that the markets expects the company's earnings to grow to a multiple of what they are today. That does not have to be explosive. And there is no reason some "bubble" has to burst.

Absolutely. It means there are lots of investors willing to fund development of new ventures.

The fastest growing economic sector in 2024 was "Information and Communication" with a 2.48% inflation-adjusted growth rate: https://www-genesis.destatis.de/datenbank/online/statistic/8... I think it'll likely keep growing faster than the rest of the economy for a while.

I read an interesting point recently: Austria's 100 wealthiest families have two thirds of the country's wealth, and none has earned their money from technology; they've all inherited it. How different would the same list be for Germany? One, perhaps two families earned their fortunes from tech? Zero outside of SAP, a company founded 50 years ago?

Germany is still a complex economy. They will likely be like Japan over the last 30 years.

Offense industry.

Important new developments in Germany in the last 10 years? Interesting question, I can think of two right now:

- Stable Diffusion at Heidelberg University

- Biontech/Pfizer covid vaccine in Mainz

- What else?

Interestingly both seem to have had no benefit to the German economy?

Stability AI is not a German company and Biontech's market cap is where it was before Covid.

Stable Diffusion main author is now doing BlackforestLabs, valued 1B?

Biontech is swimming in money and using it to foster its main goal, finding better cures for cancer.

My main point was that I can think of only two success stories.

Is BlackforestLabs a German company? On their website, they provide an address in the USA.

If Biontech is swimming in money now and did not before Covid, why didn't their market cap increase?

Because Pfizer stole the IP? U.S. nuclear weapons and rockets were developed by Europeans, Google was set up by immigrants etc.

The U.S. props up the dollar with military force, buys IP and talent from everywhere and profits.

Did they steal it or did they buy it? Which is it?

If they bought it, why was it more attractive to sell to the US?

None of them were commercialized in Germany though.

Germany and a lot of other European countries do a lot of cool cutting edge research. Problem though is that one needs to commercialize it via products and services to reap the benefits. That happens a lot in the US/UK. See the sibling thread about covid vaccine research as an example.

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