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As a German myself: Why would you not invest? Infrastructure, state of mind? I'd really love to see more high-tech companies invest here, after we've managed t

As a German myself: Why would you not invest? Infrastructure, state of mind? I'd really love to see more high-tech companies invest here, after we've managed to kill the solar companies... :-/

gallexme 5y ago
As a German Permits, the government is V slow. And labor is expensive. Also sounds expensive to use all the water they need, since they would need to clean it up very good and align the temperature with the rest of the attached rivers or what they use. And other climate relevant regulations.
- ChemSpider 5y ago
  Germany has plenty of water. Certainly more than Taiwan.
  - sabjut 5y ago
    That's what Elon Musk said too about the Brandenburg Facory ("Doesn't look like a desert so it must be ok") But environment groups are saying that ground water levels have been decreasing for years and the factory would demand too much from the water network. So who is in the right here?
    - bildung 5y ago
      I assume Tesla was just trying to be cheap. As soon as the water supplier said Teslas expected demand (372 m³ per hour) wouldn't be possible, the demand suddenly shrank to 243 m³ per hour. So my guess is that Tesla tried to reduce capex by employing more wasteful water usage but now has to work more efficiently. https://www.quarks.de/umwelt/wie-problematisch-ist-der-bau-von-teslas-gigafabrik/ https://www.quarks.de/umwelt/wie-problematisch-ist-der-bau-v...
      - tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
        I think the demand was peak demand, so all you need to reduce that is a) accept it as a bottleneck and slow the most water intensive process to spread the peak out, or b) add a buffer pool.
  - ulfw 5y ago
    Germany gets round about 750mm of rain a year, Taiwan 2500mm.
    - estaseuropano 5y ago
      Taiwan is a tiny area compared to the diversity you get in Germany, which has very diverse weather across regions, significant rivers, accessible groundwater, etc.
  - boruto 5y ago
    In Berlin there is water which even the city doesn't want. :)) http://allsinkscherman.blogspot.com/2013/02/berlin-water-pipes-you-dont-smoke.html?m=1 http://allsinkscherman.blogspot.com/2013/02/berlin-water-pip...
- MarcusE1W 5y ago
  I am not sure that it is a bad thing that a company, any company really is not allowed to play fast and loose with the environment they operate in. It’s not that the relevant laws are a secret and used to club you over the head once you nicely settled in and set up everything to your own advantage
driton 5y ago
What happened to the solar companies in Germany?
- turbinerneiter 5y ago
  We spent a lot of money on solar, lots of German companies started to fill the demand, the Chinese came in and dumped prices, Germany decided not to import-tax -> lots of German tax payer money spent on installing solar power, but all the German solar companies were priced out of the market by Chinese companies. Basically, Germany built Chinas solar industry, let our own die.
  - Max-20 5y ago
    100%, sadly this is exactly how it played out.
  - aembleton 5y ago
    Import taxes are decided by the EU, so it wouldn't have been simple for Germany to quickly react.
- est31 5y ago
  Germany entered a subsidy bidding war with China and eventually decided it's not worth the extreme skewing of the market and pulled out. This had the consequences that solar panels are now manufactured in China. IDK but from my point of view, solar panels are more dependent on salaries than chip manufacturing is.
  - jansan 5y ago
    It's also low-tech compared to chip manufacturing.
- corty 5y ago
  Practically all went bancrupt between 10 and 12 years ago. Starting around 2000, Germany began to heavily subsidize private solar panel installations with guaranteed prices around 1Eur/kWh (later falling to 0.5Eur/kWh, now around 0.1Eur/kWh). With subsidies falling, demand dropped. And initial high subsidies (some claim, see [0]) made the industry too lazy to get competitive abroad, so around 2008 China began to ramp up production for cheaper panels at dumping prices. Politicians failed to react with import duties until it was too late (around 2013). Falling domestic demand, lower prices and higher production in China and political failure to protect domestic production all lead to the death of Germany's solar industry. Even big names such as Siemens solar branch, who could have easily weathered the storm and buy up their competition on the cheap, got out as fast as they could. Because political flailing signaled imminent doom and no betterment in the long term. Of course nowadays there is again political hypocrisy mounting around the need for shorter transport routes, domestic independence, more capacity, etc. But even so, measures to prop up European solar manufacturers are very weak, import duties have been lifted and China's production has now become too strong to oppose. So there is a little useless promising before an election, then silence. [0] https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/industrie/studie-zum-niedergang-deutsche-solarbranche-vor-der-sonnenfinsternis/6748936.html?ticket=ST-12845954-6UVnQ1rU7CDTjZZeR94f-ap6 https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/industrie/studie-zu... see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27942010#27943382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27942010#27943382
volta83 5y ago
Top technical talent scarcity and cost. In Silicon Valley, you can find a dozen 600k$ engineers relatively quickly to scale up a random startup. In Germany... the salaries these people would be making would be < 100k$ because they are engineers, not managers. For some reason the only way to slightly increase your salary in Germany is to become a manager, but good luck with scaling up a start up by hiring 12 managers that don't have anybody to manage. This disparity in the valuation of top engineers cause many to emigrate, and once you are in the US, it is impossible to financially justify taking a 5x pay cut to go back to Germany. (You can justify it "non-financially", but these other justifications would need to offset the 500k$ yearly that you are leaving behind). So... finding top talent in Germany is hard. If you were to find them, hiring them would be 2x more expensive than in the US. Which makes a good that's very expensive, twice as expensive. This is one of the many reasons why the startup scene in Germany is poor. Nobody wants to be the engineer that actually builds the stuff, everybody wants to be a "manager". It turns out that many of the engineers that get to build the stuff become excellent managers once the company grows because they know it inside out. --- TL;DR: if you are a tech company that needs top engineering talent to grow a super high tech facility up, you can't find enough talent there, and the one you find is twice as expensive as somewhere else. As others have mentioned, the price of talent is insignificant for TSMC compared to the price of their machinery, so they can afford the 2x increased costs, but the lack of talent is harder to offset.
- FabHK 5y ago
  You're saying in SV, they're 600k$, but in Germany they're only 100k$, but it would be 2x expensive to hire them? Why don't you pay 600k$ gross then, they get 300k$ net, and thus 3x what they'd get otherwise in Germany, but don't have to move to the US? Seems like a feasible strategy to me.
  - volta83 5y ago
    Paying somebody 300k/year doesn't make them "top talent". The top talent is in the US, Taiwan, etc. designing the 3nm plants, operating the 5nm plants, doing research, etc. Why would a 600k$/year engineer relocate from the US to Germany for a 300k$ salary pay cut ? I've always made more money at my next job than the previous one. If a company wants me to leave my life here behind and move 15000km, they better offer me more, like 700k$ or 800k$. In Germany, that would cost the company 1.6 million $ yearly.
RivieraKid 5y ago
My general impression is that Germany is not innovative, dynamic and backwards in technology among developed nations. For example: http://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/17307.jpeg http://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/17307.jpeg Also, they've made some seemingly stupid decisions such as closing nuclear power plants. And I'm not a fan of their climate change policy, they should push for a worldwide carbon tax instead of forcing EVs.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Von der Leyen is pushing CO2 tariffs on the EU level to force CO2 taxes world wide.
- bserge 5y ago
  > closing nuclear power plants Making electricity more expensive, leading to A/C being expensive, leading to beer being sold unrefrigerated, leading to a general cognitive decline. Butterfly effect :D
- f1refly 5y ago
  I don't know why you're under the impression technological backwardness has anything to do with abandoning cash. There's a lot of things to critizise the german government for - 16k broadband lines for newly built industrial parks anyone? - but not replacing cash is certainly not it.
- iSnow 5y ago
  IDK, this chart looks like a lot of German regions are pretty innovative: https://ec.europa.eu/growth/industry/policy/innovation/regional_en https://ec.europa.eu/growth/industry/policy/innovation/regio... Also, Germany pushing for a worldwide carbon tax? That's neat, but I doubt it would cause more than a yawn in Washington, Beijing, or Delhi.

As a German myself: Why would you not invest? Infrastructure, state of mind? I'd really love to see more high-tech companies invest here, after we've managed to kill the solar companies... :-/

gallexme 5y ago

As a German Permits, the government is V slow. And labor is expensive. Also sounds expensive to use all the water they need, since they would need to clean it up very good and align the temperature with the rest of the attached rivers or what they use. And other climate relevant regulations.

ChemSpider 5y ago
Germany has plenty of water. Certainly more than Taiwan.
- sabjut 5y ago
  That's what Elon Musk said too about the Brandenburg Facory ("Doesn't look like a desert so it must be ok") But environment groups are saying that ground water levels have been decreasing for years and the factory would demand too much from the water network. So who is in the right here?
  - bildung 5y ago
    I assume Tesla was just trying to be cheap. As soon as the water supplier said Teslas expected demand (372 m³ per hour) wouldn't be possible, the demand suddenly shrank to 243 m³ per hour. So my guess is that Tesla tried to reduce capex by employing more wasteful water usage but now has to work more efficiently. https://www.quarks.de/umwelt/wie-problematisch-ist-der-bau-von-teslas-gigafabrik/ https://www.quarks.de/umwelt/wie-problematisch-ist-der-bau-v...
    - tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
      I think the demand was peak demand, so all you need to reduce that is a) accept it as a bottleneck and slow the most water intensive process to spread the peak out, or b) add a buffer pool.
- ulfw 5y ago
  Germany gets round about 750mm of rain a year, Taiwan 2500mm.
  - estaseuropano 5y ago
    Taiwan is a tiny area compared to the diversity you get in Germany, which has very diverse weather across regions, significant rivers, accessible groundwater, etc.
- boruto 5y ago
  In Berlin there is water which even the city doesn't want. :)) http://allsinkscherman.blogspot.com/2013/02/berlin-water-pipes-you-dont-smoke.html?m=1 http://allsinkscherman.blogspot.com/2013/02/berlin-water-pip...
MarcusE1W 5y ago
I am not sure that it is a bad thing that a company, any company really is not allowed to play fast and loose with the environment they operate in. It’s not that the relevant laws are a secret and used to club you over the head once you nicely settled in and set up everything to your own advantage

driton 5y ago

What happened to the solar companies in Germany?

turbinerneiter 5y ago
We spent a lot of money on solar, lots of German companies started to fill the demand, the Chinese came in and dumped prices, Germany decided not to import-tax -> lots of German tax payer money spent on installing solar power, but all the German solar companies were priced out of the market by Chinese companies. Basically, Germany built Chinas solar industry, let our own die.
- Max-20 5y ago
  100%, sadly this is exactly how it played out.
- aembleton 5y ago
  Import taxes are decided by the EU, so it wouldn't have been simple for Germany to quickly react.
est31 5y ago
Germany entered a subsidy bidding war with China and eventually decided it's not worth the extreme skewing of the market and pulled out. This had the consequences that solar panels are now manufactured in China. IDK but from my point of view, solar panels are more dependent on salaries than chip manufacturing is.
- jansan 5y ago
  It's also low-tech compared to chip manufacturing.
corty 5y ago
Practically all went bancrupt between 10 and 12 years ago. Starting around 2000, Germany began to heavily subsidize private solar panel installations with guaranteed prices around 1Eur/kWh (later falling to 0.5Eur/kWh, now around 0.1Eur/kWh). With subsidies falling, demand dropped. And initial high subsidies (some claim, see [0]) made the industry too lazy to get competitive abroad, so around 2008 China began to ramp up production for cheaper panels at dumping prices. Politicians failed to react with import duties until it was too late (around 2013). Falling domestic demand, lower prices and higher production in China and political failure to protect domestic production all lead to the death of Germany's solar industry. Even big names such as Siemens solar branch, who could have easily weathered the storm and buy up their competition on the cheap, got out as fast as they could. Because political flailing signaled imminent doom and no betterment in the long term. Of course nowadays there is again political hypocrisy mounting around the need for shorter transport routes, domestic independence, more capacity, etc. But even so, measures to prop up European solar manufacturers are very weak, import duties have been lifted and China's production has now become too strong to oppose. So there is a little useless promising before an election, then silence. [0] https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/industrie/studie-zum-niedergang-deutsche-solarbranche-vor-der-sonnenfinsternis/6748936.html?ticket=ST-12845954-6UVnQ1rU7CDTjZZeR94f-ap6 https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/industrie/studie-zu... see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27942010#27943382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27942010#27943382

volta83 5y ago

Top technical talent scarcity and cost. In Silicon Valley, you can find a dozen 600k$ engineers relatively quickly to scale up a random startup. In Germany... the salaries these people would be making would be < 100k$ because they are engineers, not managers. For some reason the only way to slightly increase your salary in Germany is to become a manager, but good luck with scaling up a start up by hiring 12 managers that don't have anybody to manage. This disparity in the valuation of top engineers cause many to emigrate, and once you are in the US, it is impossible to financially justify taking a 5x pay cut to go back to Germany. (You can justify it "non-financially", but these other justifications would need to offset the 500k$ yearly that you are leaving behind). So... finding top talent in Germany is hard. If you were to find them, hiring them would be 2x more expensive than in the US. Which makes a good that's very expensive, twice as expensive. This is one of the many reasons why the startup scene in Germany is poor. Nobody wants to be the engineer that actually builds the stuff, everybody wants to be a "manager". It turns out that many of the engineers that get to build the stuff become excellent managers once the company grows because they know it inside out. --- TL;DR: if you are a tech company that needs top engineering talent to grow a super high tech facility up, you can't find enough talent there, and the one you find is twice as expensive as somewhere else. As others have mentioned, the price of talent is insignificant for TSMC compared to the price of their machinery, so they can afford the 2x increased costs, but the lack of talent is harder to offset.

FabHK 5y ago
You're saying in SV, they're 600k$, but in Germany they're only 100k$, but it would be 2x expensive to hire them? Why don't you pay 600k$ gross then, they get 300k$ net, and thus 3x what they'd get otherwise in Germany, but don't have to move to the US? Seems like a feasible strategy to me.
- volta83 5y ago
  Paying somebody 300k/year doesn't make them "top talent". The top talent is in the US, Taiwan, etc. designing the 3nm plants, operating the 5nm plants, doing research, etc. Why would a 600k$/year engineer relocate from the US to Germany for a 300k$ salary pay cut ? I've always made more money at my next job than the previous one. If a company wants me to leave my life here behind and move 15000km, they better offer me more, like 700k$ or 800k$. In Germany, that would cost the company 1.6 million $ yearly.

RivieraKid 5y ago

My general impression is that Germany is not innovative, dynamic and backwards in technology among developed nations. For example: http://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/17307.jpeg http://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/17307.jpeg Also, they've made some seemingly stupid decisions such as closing nuclear power plants. And I'm not a fan of their climate change policy, they should push for a worldwide carbon tax instead of forcing EVs.

imtringued 5y ago
Von der Leyen is pushing CO2 tariffs on the EU level to force CO2 taxes world wide.
bserge 5y ago
> closing nuclear power plants Making electricity more expensive, leading to A/C being expensive, leading to beer being sold unrefrigerated, leading to a general cognitive decline. Butterfly effect :D
f1refly 5y ago
I don't know why you're under the impression technological backwardness has anything to do with abandoning cash. There's a lot of things to critizise the german government for - 16k broadband lines for newly built industrial parks anyone? - but not replacing cash is certainly not it.
iSnow 5y ago
IDK, this chart looks like a lot of German regions are pretty innovative: https://ec.europa.eu/growth/industry/policy/innovation/regional_en https://ec.europa.eu/growth/industry/policy/innovation/regio... Also, Germany pushing for a worldwide carbon tax? That's neat, but I doubt it would cause more than a yawn in Washington, Beijing, or Delhi.