For a business, there's no incentive anymore to choose Germany over other EU countries. Cheap energy is gone. Germany is literally collapsing under its own weight: endless bureaucratic structures that just keep on growing.
Just let it fail? I'm reminded of this, which I read recently about rare earths:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/12/business/china-rare-earth...:
> Rare earth refineries and magnet factories all over the world have been buying Chinese equipment for the past 20 years. Many equipment vendors in North America and Europe closed when most of the world’s rare earth mining shifted to China in the late 1990s.
I'm sure that, at the time, people were saying that North American and European rare earth equipment manufacturers were "non-competitive for multiple years now."
Don't get me wrong, I agree there is such a thing as "forget the comparative advantage of trade, this is national security", and I even think steel and cement need to be in that category right after farm subsidies, but also you do have to be strategic, and you don't want private corporations "too important to fail" which turn subsidies into shareholder returns without adding real value.
They are now downsizing, etc in order to save themselves.