The increase was due to the improving performance of the country's economy and also to the fact that the basis of comparison was March 2020, when the industry's performance was already heavily impacted by the first COVID-19 lockdown in Germany, ZVEI chief economist Andreas Gontermann said in a statement.
In March 2021, new orders from the eurozone increased by 25.6 percent year-on-year, while orders from customers in non-European Union (EU) countries were up 28.6 percent, according to the ZVEI.
Capacity utilization based on normal operations rose to 86.7 percent in April, which was more than ten percentage points higher than a year ago. The ZVEI stressed that the German electrical industry's export expectations for the next three months "increased sharply again."
Although exports for the German electrical industry rose by 2.6 percent only year-on-year in February, its exports to China -- which last year extended its lead as the top customer country for the German electrical industry -- strongly increased by 21.7 percent, according to recent ZVEI data.
Germany's total exports to China in March soared by 37.9 percent year-on-year and reached 10.3 billion euros (12.5 billion U.S. dollars). China remained Germany's biggest import partner, with the value of goods imported from there totaling 11.7 billion euros (up 46.6 percent), the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) said last week. (1 euro = 1.22 U.S. dollars)
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