The German machine tool industry’s order bookings increased by 24% in the fourth quarter of 2017, compared with the same quarter in 2016.

Domestic orders were up by 48%, while orders from abroad rose by 13%. For 2017 as a whole, there was an overall increase of 8%, with domestic orders climbing by 10%; orders from abroad ended up 7%, with euro-zone nations the driving forces here.

Wilfried Schäfer, executive director of the Frankfurt-based VDW (German Machine Tool Builders’ Association), said: “The year’s second half saw a breakthrough on the domestic market.

While domestic orders were still falling by double-figure rates in the year’s first half, the German industrial sector threw off its caution in the second half and opted for massive investment — in particular, following the EMO Hannover 2017 machine tool show in September.

Compared with the previous year, orders soared by 41% in October, 67% in November and 37% in December.”

The VDW (www.vdw.de) says the flood of orders is attributable not least to the good performance of the global economy.

“Capital investment and machine tool consumption are rising in all regions, and this is benefitting all technologies in the machine tool industry.

“Most recently, forming technology has again been benefitting from large-scale orders again, these having been absent in the preceding months. Production output in 2017 reached another new record level, with a 4% increase taking it to 15.7 billion euros.”