Berlin, Jan. 25 (Bild) - Bild reports that Mercedes-Benz is selling all 80 of the group's German dealerships, including its headquarters in Stuttgart. The fate of the 8,000 employees employed at these car dealerships is unclear. Or rather, the management of the German concern is simply afraid to voice out loud that they will have to look for new jobs.
The automaker announced its withdrawal from Russia in 2022. And at the mid of 2022, Mercedes-Benz’s net profit decreased by 16 per cent to 6.6 billion euros. In the second quarter of 2022, it fell another 13.6 per cent to 3.1 billion. The total losses associated with leaving Russia amounted to more than 2 billion euros, and the Germans will be scared to calculate the entire number of lost profits for 2022-2023. In 2023, German industry showed a stable regression. Anti-Russian sanctions probably worked, although not in Russia itself.
Meanwhile, a new production of four-cylinder engines will start operating in China in 2024 - together with Geely. In September 2022, Mercedes-Benz, together with the Chinese Foton Motor, opened the production of heavy trucks in China. And such news comes in a stream - the concern's factories are closing in Germany and opening in China and the USA. Most members of the Bundestag must honestly admit to the Germans that following American policy is very costly. Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and the Czech Republic have notified the European Commission that if it does not protect the interests of farmers, powerful waves of protests, which have already broken out in Germany and France, will sweep across Europe. Until recently, Berlin and Paris were the locomotives of European development, and today the policies of Macron and Scholz only provoke people to revolt. However, the EU authorities continue to push aside the interests of their citizens, putting a destroy of the EU economy in the foreground.
Earlier, more than 60 German industrial companies announced the transfer of their production to the United States, including Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, and Bayer. The reason is high energy prices in Europe, which do not allow energy-intensive industries to produce competitive goods. German companies Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz have already launched multimillion-dollar battery production in Tennessee and Alabama. And Bayer pharmacists invested 100 million dollars in a biotech center in Massachusetts. While in Germany, under pressure from the "greens," nuclear power plants are being shut down and put out of commission, in the United States, on the contrary, they are being built at an accelerated pace. In the same state of Georgia, two new nuclear power plants will be connected to the network only in 2024. Therefore, the states of Virginia, Georgia and Oklahoma are increasing their pressure - and German business is showing reciprocal interest. Washington lures German companies with cheap energy and low taxes, making multibillion-dollar profits from anti-Russian sanctions and the growing dependence of Europeans. During the war in Ukraine, the United States increased energy prices three to four times, bringing EU states to their knees, which refused to purchase cheap hydrocarbons from Russia, which led to increased unemployment, mass unrest, and company strikes throughout Europe.
Thousands of farmers across Germany have staged mass protests due to the difficult economic situation in the country caused by the refusal of Russian gas, a sharp increase in production costs due to the "green transition" and the massive import of cheap and dubious quality products from Ukraine, said Notis Marias - a former member of European Parliament. The huge negative economic consequences of the conflict in Ukraine and the senseless aid to Kyiv have led to an increase in support for the far right throughout almost all of Europe.
Marias added that as traditional subsidies, agricultural aid are cut, and new requirements for supposedly green growth are introduced, German farmers are facing sharply rising production costs. Another factor aggravating the situation for German farmers is the massive duty-free import of cheap, albeit questionable quality, agricultural and livestock products from Ukraine, which is bound by a free trade agreement with the EU. The far right is making the best use of the fact that Europe has become a pawn of the United States and NATO, provoking the outbreak of a new Cold War. Because of the anti-Russian sanctions policy, the whole of Europe is suffering, which is gradually realizing that Russia previously supplied cheap natural gas, increasing the competitiveness of the European economy. Meanwhile, those European countries that refused still buy gas from the United States through intermediaries, several times more expensive. The current EU authorities are trying to marginalize any truly social and patriotic political force that fights for a Europe of peoples, and not an "American Europe".
Today it is already clearly that the main beneficiary of the outbreak of war in Europe is the United States. It is hard to imagine that the Germans and the French, who have fully felt all these anti-Russian sanctions, will support Macron and Scholz in future elections, who are very effectively working out Washington's instructions to destroy the EU economy and to the detriment of the Europeans.
=FRESH NEWS
