Dusseldorf Hello dear readers,
The upcoming Easter festival is the third in a row in which nothing is as it once was. While Corona and various contact restrictions plagued us in 2020 and 2021, this year it is the war in Ukraine that is throwing our supposed normality upside down. The supermarket shelves remain empty in places, and Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier is declared an undesirable person by Ukrainian President Selenski. And Chancellor Olaf Scholz is apparently still not planning a trip to Kyiv.
These days I keep consciously reading the diary of the Ukrainian Tatiana Chontoroh. Chontoroh lost her child in Kyiv and has now fled to Germany. Your experiences put your own problems in relation.
The developments on the German labor market contrast with the feeling of a permanent crisis. That’s where it’s booming. In Germany, the salaries of specialists have risen during the crisis, a shortage of skilled workers and inflation are fueling the trend, write colleagues Lazar Backovic and Jens Münchrath in their major report this week. Due to the massive increase in salaries in some sectors, many fear a salary bubble.
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What I found particularly exciting about the story was the question of possible alternative employer benefits that make jobs attractive – apart from salary increases. Flexible working hours and home office options were mentioned first.
Our Easter weekend title is about something I’ve always thought of as balding men on expensive motorcycles: The Midlife Crisis. However, the colleague Christof Kerkmann takes this picture for the state of SAP.
The software group around CEO Christian Klein has to reinvent itself. As with a human mid-life crisis, it is less about bare survival than about the question of meaning: “What role do you want, can you still play over 50 in an IT world that is changing faster than ever before”. Kerkmann writes that younger, more agile companies are eroding their traditional market position. The fact that SAP lacks conclusive answers to these questions can be seen from the share price.
Christian Klein (front), Hasso Plattner: SAP in the mid-life crisis.
What else kept us busy this week:
1. These are strange times when Green politicians are demanding arms deliveries. But that’s exactly what happened this week – first by Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, then by the chair of the Committee on European Affairs. During a visit to the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, Anton Hofreiter said: “Olaf Scholz must finally deliver.” – provided the federal government agrees.
2. Like me, you may have received numerous messages in Whatsapp groups over the past few weeks with the following tenor: “We’ll stop Putin by turning down the heating”. The realization that it’s not quite that simple has apparently not yet caught on with everyone. I was all the more pleased about the text by my colleague Catiana Krapp this week. Using a visualization tool from the Jülich research facility, it shows who would have to save how much gas in the event of an embargo in order to compensate for the losses.
3. The Spanish Volkswagen subsidiary Seat is currently uneasy. It is the only car brand in the group that was in the red in the previous two years. With the new performance brand Cupra, there should finally be profits in Spain again. But the growth of Cupra is at the expense of the traditional Seat brand.
4. I already mentioned it at the beginning – there is still not much evidence of a mood of crisis on the German labor market. In fact, more and more management positions are currently being advertised. Three HR managers have revealed to colleague Lazar Backovic which profiles they are currently looking for. If that’s too exhausting for you – the text “14 jobs with little stress and good pay” also interested many of our readers this week.
5. LNG terminals are currently the big hope for moving away from Russian gas. And indeed, the terminals for liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Qatar or the USA are progressing faster than expected. Colleagues Kathrin Witsch and Klaus Stratmann examined the topic in more detail this week. Appropriately, it was reported on Thursday that the federal government intends to spend up to 3 billion euros on four floating liquid gas terminals over the next ten years.
6. The line between gossip press and great entrepreneurship is very thin for Elon Musk. This week, the Tesla founder made headlines because he wanted to buy the short message service Twitter. He already owns 9.2 percent of the company’s shares, but he refused a seat on the board of directors – apparently because he was planning a takeover attack. Musk’s tweets on the subject sometimes read erratically – fortunately we have the big analysis by Thomas Jahn, Christof Kerkmann and Stephan Scheuer. Colleague Scheuer also wrote down four scenarios for the future of Twitter and analyzed the company’s new defense strategy for the “poison pill”.
7. No weekly review without Anne Spiegel. The Federal Family Minister resigned on Monday as the first minister of the traffic light coalition. Reasons were her communication, which was more concerned with her own image, and a vacation trip after the floods in the Ahr Valley. But even with an apparently hastily convened press conference on Sunday, Spiegel had not done itself any favors. Colleague Martin Greive commented on this: “A government is only ever as good as its ministers. Olaf Scholz is now learning this lesson too.” Incidentally, last Thursday the Greens politician Lisa Paus was named as Spiegel’s successor.
8th. Should you find time for a longer piece of reading at the weekend, I would like to recommend an essay by my colleague Jens Münchrath. In seven theses, he wrote down how much the Ukraine war will change our world – and despite the hatred in the world, he manages to end the text with hope.
I wish you a nice Easter weekend, come and relax.
your
Charlotte Haunhorst
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