Ann: MEDIA RELEASE H1 2022 NPAT USD60 Million UP 231%, page-78

Energy Crisis Fallout How Bad Will the German Recession Be?

The first German companies have begun throwing in the towel and consumption is collapsing in response to the fallout from exploding energy prices. The economy is sliding almost uncontrolled into a crisis that could permanently weaken the country.
What lies ahead for the German economy, you can go out and talk to executives in the automotive industry and scholars of the economy; you can study inflation data and share prices. But it's probably also enough just to take a look at an indispensable, everyday product: toilet paper.


In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, the product served as a gauge of the level of Germans' anxiety. The steeper the rate of infection, the emptier the shelves. Manufacturers of the hygiene product were even among the beneficiaries of the pandemic. Now, worries are once again growing across the country about potential shortages of toilet paper, only this time for completely different reasons. Hakle, a household brand name in Germany founded almost 100 years ago, last week filed for bankruptcy in self-administration.

The medium-sized paper manufacturer is one of the first victims of the crisis that is eating through the entire country. You need energy to turn wood into toilet paper – quite a lot of it. Hakle uses 60,000 megawatt hours of natural gas and 40,000 megawatt hours of electricity annually at its Düsseldorf plant alone. And the company can no longer afford it. Skyrocketing energy and raw material prices combined to push Hakle over the edge.

https://www.spiegel.de/internationa...ion-be-a-9e1f479e-5fef-4e62-b5ca-2f9e87b9bbca