Germany's engineering body VDMA slashes its production forecast for 2019 from 2% to 1% in April

Incoming orders and real production in mechanical engineering have slowed down considerably in the first few months of the  year, and looking forward does not promise any improvement. "Therefore, a revision of our forecast is unavoidable; we now expect production to fall by 2 percent in real terms in 2019," explained VDMA President Carl Martin Welcker in a press conference. This revision is necessary despite the high order backlog, which was sufficient for 8.5 months in April. This is because this backlog is unevenly distributed across companies and industries and cannot completely cushion the sharp drop in incoming orders till the end of the year. Previously, VDMA economists had assumed a slight increase in production of 1 percent for the year as a whole. 

In the first four months of the current year, mechanical engineering production stagnated in comparison with the previous year. According to preliminary figures, in April it was 0.8 percent below the previous year's figure. In the first five months of the current year, order intake in the mechanical engineering sector was 9 percent lower than in the previous year. Capacity utilisation still reached 87.4 percent in April.