Hacker News Reader

Comment by _ink_ | Hacker News Reader

Wow, Denmark is leading manufacturing growth and the German government is still telling us that the hourly wage is the problem.

View on HN

That's basically just Novo Nordisk manufacturing Ozempic. Yes, it's big enough to distort all graphs about Denmark.

(the real lesson here is "make a product that everyone wants")

If you look at actual numbers it is clear that danish manufacturing is very healthy underneath the NN success.

Denmark is also a leader in offshore wind power systems, so no it's not just pharma.

Germany is making a gigantic amounts of offshore wind too (and onshore)

There's no German manufacturer among the top 10 in offshore wind. Siemens business had started in Denmark (and was #2 there) and after merger with Gamesa is now headquartered in Spain, with a lot of technical facilities still in Denmark.

Almost all Poles are very surprised about the second country on that graph.

Edit: well, after some thinking and remembering all the banners for laser cutting and cnc machining in nearby areas (touristic region at that), there might be some truth to it.

The Polish manufacturing miracle is really well known among people who study economics so it's funny that natural Polish people wouldn't be aware of it.

I explain this with our national pessimism and constant complaints about everything. We also compare ourselves to rest of Europe, where wages are still better and many things are cheaper.

Agreed. Actually - maybe no? Maybe the hourly wage is the problem. It's been too low for too long so there was no pressure to innovate. Denmark and Switzerland are big manufacturers with high wages that are continuously innovating. Maybe the Euro was a curse for Germany afteral? Without it their wages would have been higher.

Artificially increasing wages to get a better product is like Cargo Culting. Some people see successful companies paying their employees a ton, then assume that's what created the successful company when it's so obviously the other way around. But the politicians/union heads benefit from selling it the other way. This conversation just always gets derailed by pointing out how paying substantially below market is also bad, as if it were a counterpoint.

That's my point in France also: industries complain about the cost of workforce, therefore they've moved everything offshore for the last two decades and they are lobbying heavily for lowering the wages and taxes in order to "invest".

But there is nothing to invest into anymore, France's industry is dead (partly because of Germany with the Hartz agreement btw, lowering demand for italian or french goods which were already less competitive than german ones on export and domestic market because of the euro) and if they didn't care to put capital on automation when wages were high, why would they do it when work becomes cheap?

>That's my point in France also: industries complain about the cost of workforce, therefore they've moved everything offshore for the last two decades and they are lobbying heavily for lowering the wages and taxes in order to "invest".

100% exactly the same in Austria and I can speculate Italy as well.

Interestingly there was a public discussion in Denmark around 2016, about how the Danish labor market and industry should not end up approaching 'German conditions', even though the Hartz reforms were envied by some economically liberal Danish politicians.

Looks like as if it was a good choice to not copy the Hartz reforma.

I'd really like to know which products that manufacturing in Denmark produces. Ozempic is a massive financial success, so maybe that is a large part of it? The lesson from Ozempic would be "Just have a huge hit come out of your R&D department", I guess...

...and be a relatively small country.

Novo Nordisk's sales numbers of 300bln DKK (~$46bln) amount to around 10% of Denmark's GDP.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com