Our assessment

Germany is an industrialized country. This is why the buzzword “Industry 4.0” has long been able to maintain itself in Germany as a synonym for the forward-looking “Internet of Things”.

“Talk of Industry 4.0 is still nonsense”.

Yet the foundations for a data-driven “Industry 4.0” are not even in place, as Werner Vogels (“our” German on the Amazon board; not the guy in the preview picture) stated at the DLD conference in Munich in early 2020. He argued that the term was “nonsense” because the machines were not suitable for even the simplest data processing.

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(You can watch Werner Vogel’s statements right at the beginning of the video – Attention: english!)

State of affairs

The term “Industry 4.0” serves primarily to continue to position German industry as the locomotive of the German economy. In the transformation process, it is fighting for interpretive sovereignty and corresponding subsidies.

However, doubts are being raised everywhere as to whether the German industrial landscape in particular has not colossally overslept the digital transformation, also in the interest of a sustainable economy.

Unfortunately, the primarily digital mindset that fundamentally questions and reorganizes existing process chains is missing across the board in German business. Other players without legacy burdens are far more agile and transformative in this respect.