Oil price rise triggers off German export boom

The reason why: the oil-exporting countries spent their newly-won petrodollars preferably on German quality hardware.

According to internal figures compiled by the Association of German Machinery and Technical Plant Manufacturers (VDMA), the demand from the OPEC countries for German capital goods has risen by 20.7 per cent in the first six months of this year.

Ralph Wiechers, the Chief Economist of VDMA, told AME Info: 'We have indeed very nice orders coming in from the OPEC countries for quite a time now. For example, the volume of orders from Saudi Arabia rose by 59.4 per cent in the first half of 2005; Iran booked additional 46 per cent of German hardware in the same period, Egypt 47.4 and Libya 53.2 per cent.'

A case in point is Linde AG: In July, SABIC awarded the engineering giant contracts for the supply and construction of two large polyethylene plants in Al Jubail worth some EUR500 million.

The plants will have an annual production capacity of 800,000 tons of polyethylene and are scheduled to start operation in early 2008. Polyethylene is one of the most important compound plastics, with rapidly growing demand, especially in China and India.

In a similar vain, the Berlin-based cooling plant specialist GEA GmbH very recently pocketed orders in Saudi-Arabia totalling EUR230 million.
Petrochemical plant, bottling facilities, steel mills: 'Made in Germany' is in great demand in the Middle East these days.