Nine reasons for optimism in 2022: The editor-in-chief’s weekly review

Good morning dear readers,

I’ll get in touch from Düsseldorf with best wishes for 2022.

This new year begins with a contradiction: While the latest Corona variant Omikron is spreading at breakneck speed worldwide, many companies are looking to the next few months with great optimism.

The order books of the industry are well filled, important trading partners such as the USA, France and Italy are likely to see strong growth in 2022, and the supply bottlenecks that have hit many companies hard will in many cases be resolved. And so it is no wonder that not a single one of 48 trade associations expects a decline in production or business, as a survey by the Institut der Deutschen Wirtschaft (IW) showed.

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Of course there is also a lot of uncertainty. The situation on the Russian-Ukrainian border is unsolved and the Omikron wave is likely to cause massive sickness reports in the next few months. Hospitals, fire brigade stations and power plant operators have therefore long been working on emergency plans.

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But there are also plenty of reasons to be optimistic about the new year. Here is a very personal selection:

1. 2022 will be the first year of a new normal. We won’t check off Corona. But we will learn to live with the virus. In December, the European Medicines Agency Ema approved the first two antibody therapies against Covid-19. Further drugs are about to be approved. At the same time, the virus is becoming more contagious, but less dangerous: the current variant of Omicron, which is spreading rapidly around the world, is not the same disease as it was a year ago, say scientists. It is quite possible that the coronavirus will lose its horror as early as 2022 – and turn from a fearful opponent into a rather harmless, annually recurring nuisance.

Biontech boss Ugur Sahin, Medigene boss Dolores Schendel, patient Emily Whitehead: In the opinion of many experts, the novel immunotherapies mark a new era in cancer treatment.

2. A year of new beginnings lies ahead of us. It is not just the companies that are optimistic about the beginning of the year. Many people are using the Corona turning point as an opportunity: According to current figures, around half of employees in Germany are on the move – the situation is similar with executives, as my colleague Lazar Backovic recently analyzed. A moment ago there was talk of a great resignation when work psychologists talked about the state of affairs in companies. What a mistake. Corona acts like a biographical change catalyst.

The time to step into the unknown has never been better. Job exchanges report new record numbers of vacancies almost every month. In the past, people made their lives fit for the job. Now they are looking for the right job for their life. This has consequences: companies no longer just ask what employees can do for them. They think much more seriously what else they can do for their employees in addition to an attractive salary. They understand that they will not win the battle for the good people with free fruit baskets.

The great shift in power from companies to employees has long since begun: Many companies are just learning that employees no longer apply to them, but that they have to fight for the best people. Apple, it became known a few days ago, is giving its “high performers” stock options of up to $ 180,000 shortly before the end of the year if they stay. The reason for the unexpected Christmas present is the fear that high performers could switch to the Facebook parent company Meta.

3. Medicine is making huge strides. It is clear that our children are getting significantly older than we are. One of the reasons for this is the enormous progress made in the fight against cancer. Scientists are genetically upgrading the body’s own immune cells to destroy tumors. Cell therapies against cancer, for example, are experiencing a real research boom.

Since the beginning of the year, more electric Porsches have been delivered than 911s.

(Photo: imago images / Ralph Peters)

The number of development projects in this fascinating field almost doubled between 2019 and 2021 to more than 2000 worldwide, as our company reporters Siegried Hofmann and Maike Telgheder impressively described a few days ago. At the forefront: several German biotech companies such as Biontech, known for its corona vaccine, as well as Gemoab, Immatics, T-Knife and Miltenyi. A development that is encouraging.

4th The new tech boom is European. Never before have investors from all over the world put so much money into German start-ups as in 2021. By September it was around 12.4 billion euros – and at that time it was more than twice as much as in the previous record year of 2019. Particularly in demand: Deeptech -Companies such as rocket manufacturers, air taxi manufacturers, quantum computers or nuclear fusion reactors. Or start-ups that develop software systems for companies and their production facilities.

European founders are strong in all of these areas – the world’s largest investors are now recognizing this. Despite the usual complaints from the scene: Every good idea is now financed. You no longer have to travel to Silicon Valley to visit the most innovative startups. A trip to Munich, Berlin or Paris is enough.

5. The traffic turnaround succeeds, but … not with Deutsche Bahn. Only 69 percent of the trains run on time through the mild winter – you can hardly imagine what would happen if we also had winter temperatures, snow and ice. Meanwhile, the traffic turnaround is taking place elsewhere: With Flixbus, Germany has a real global player in the market for long-distance buses, the most energy-efficient means of mass transport of all.

Never before have so many electric cars been registered in Germany as in 2021. Experts estimate that next year a third of all newly registered vehicles will be either purely electric or powered by a hybrid engine. How serious the situation is for German combustion engine fans is shown by the numbers of Porsche’s gasoline-in-blood apologists: In the first nine months of the year, Porsche sold more fully electric Taycans than 911s. If there were charging stations and green electricity, the traffic turnaround project on the road could actually succeed.

The management expert is a PhD philosopher who initially worked in personnel development. The 68-year-old management author’s credo: Real motivation does not come from incentives, but from our own initiative. (Photo: Stefan Kröger)

6th In many countries the danger of populism has been averted: There was much discussion about the weakness of Western democracies and values, and the world looked with concern at Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping and their little brothers in spirit like Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban. But the political center is more resilient than feared, as shown not only by the general election. Things are looking good for Emmanuel Macron in the French presidential election. And in Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s long reign could come to an end in 2023, as our Turkey correspondent Ozan Demircan recently described: The president is only wavering from one crisis to the next.

7th Technologies are evolving at an exponential rate. For many years, Moore’s law applied in the computer industry, according to which the performance of computer chips doubles every 12 to 24 months. This rule now jumps over to other areas: Because faster computers enable more powerful algorithms, the performance of which increases much faster than that of computer chips. These algorithms, in turn, enable scientific advances in biotechnology, which in turn help create more effective drugs, self-driving cars, and autonomous factories.

Without the combination of biotech and AI, it would not have been possible to bring around a dozen Covid vaccines onto the market in one year. Technology experts see the world at the dawn of the age of technology development at an exponential rate. However, this also has its price: According to the Edelmann Trust Barometer, technological change is happening too quickly for 60 percent of the 30,000 respondents worldwide.

8. This is the chance for a new generation of managers. Now the time begins for those who can lead companies through these ever faster changes, who explain this process and take their colleagues with them on this path. That is anything but easy. Many people will have to relearn and move. Some will not be able to keep up with the ever increasing speed, others will not want to.
76 percent of the respondents to the Edelmann Trust Barometer said that CEOs should take the lead in changes and not wait for the government to do so. The management thought leader Reinhard Sprenger said in the Handelsblatt: “Managers experience an unprecedented complexity and communication explosion around them.” They have to be controlled “in order to create common orientation maps from diffuse signals”.

9. Many of these new leaders are female. For years the low proportion of women in management positions has been lamented. Now the trend reversal has arrived: never before have more women been recruited at board level in German corporations than in the past twelve months. 28 percent of the newly filled management positions were filled by women in the largest listed German companies in the past twelve months. Talking to headhunters should only have been the beginning. And what the figures also show: in many cases women are even better than their male colleagues on executive boards.

Now I wish you a powerful start into the new year. Let’s keep in touch. Tell me what you like about the Handelsblatt and in which areas we need to improve. Because we, too, dear readers, are in this long process of change. Our drive is to make business journalism as exciting, varied and useful as possible for you.

Sincerely,
Her

Sebastian Matthes
Editor-in-chief Handelsblatt

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