New challenges
February 15, 2012
When Michael Pfeiffer talks about Indonesia, he quickly gets enthusiastic. The country offers great investment opportunities, he says, especially for small and medium sized companies. Pfeiffer is the head of Germany Trade & Invest (GTAI), Germany's foreign trade and investment agency, which advises companies on investment opportunities abroad.
Indonesiais rich in resources and raw materials, has three times as many people as Germany and offers a huge domestic market. In the last year global imports to Indonesia have increased by some 30 percent. In the same period, Germany's exports to the Southeast Asian country have gone up just four percent.
"It shouldn't be like that," Pfeiffer told Deutsche Welle. "We can do better than that - and Indonesia's imports are likely to grow again in 2012."
The country is currently in need of many of the products Germany has on offer, including machinery, industrial plants, chemical products, food, cars, and environmental technologies.
New opportunities
Apart from Indonesia, Pfeiffer lists Mongolia, Tunisia, Norway, Slovakia, Peru and Mexico as Germany's other top growing export markets of the future. GTAI has just released a study on "Germany's top export markets in 2012."
The established trade partners "remain the same," Pfeiffer says. Berlin's European neighbors France, the Netherlands, Italy and the UK are the biggest recipients of German exports. Another big market is the US, followed by the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China.
For the last three years, however, "GTAI has been selecting new countries that we then present as investment opportunities," Pfeiffer explains. This year, one of those countries is Slovakia.
"As a small country it is hardly talked about, but its growth is in fact better than the European average." Slovakia's growth prognosis for this year is 1.7 percent. This figure is expected to rise to 2.7 percent in 2013. By comparison, Germany would be satisfied with a growth rate of one percent in 2012.
Slovakia and Mongolia
What's important for German companies is that Slovakia is investing heavily in roads and railways. The country is also a main producer of electronics - something which few investors are aware of.
"Did you know for instance that one in four flat-screen televisions sold in Europe are from Slovakia?" Pfeiffer asked with a smile.
He then moves on to Mongolia, a country which currently has next to no trade with Germany - a mere 150 million euros ($196 million dollars) in trade volume.
"But each year, Mongolia is doubling its imports from Germany," Pfeiffer says. There are plenty of natural resources and raw materials there, but the country needs infrastructure. Therefore there are ample investment opportunities, says Pfeiffer, as Mongolia is profiting heavily from the raw materials boom.
His advice for German small and medium sized companies is to be open-minded, "have a look around - there are a lot of opportunities just waiting to be discovered."
Author: Klaus Ulrich / ai
Editor: Charlotte Chelsom-Pill