Prior +5.6%; revised to +5.7%

That’s a huge beat on estimates as German manufacturing orders surged once again in December, after a big jump in November last year as well. A lot of that is to do with a massive increase in large orders though. If you strip that out of the report, new orders were only 0.9% higher than in the previous month.

The less volatile three-month comparison shows new orders in Q4 being up 9.5% than in Q3. Excluding large orders, that figure is a 2.5% increase.

Looking at the details, the surge in industrial orders in December owes much to significant increases in the production of metal products (+30.2%) and in the important mechanical engineering sector (+11.5%). Besides that, there were also growth in orders for the manufacture of electrical equipment (+9.8%) and in the manufacture of data processing equipment, electronic and optical products (+5.7%).

Overall, the preliminary figures show that industrial sales in 2025 were 1.3% lower than in the previous year, adjusted for calendar effects.