Enough China-bashing, said Martin Brudermüller, BASF chief executive, last week as he reacted to critics of the group’s plans to expand in the country while downsizing in sluggish Europe.
Instead of fretting about the chemical giant’s $10bn investment in China, Europe would do better to examine its own “deficits and weaknesses”, he said.
Brudermüller, who is leading a trade delegation to China with German chancellor Olaf Scholz this week, is not wrong. European industrial companies struggle against some pretty fierce headwinds — not just the unusually high energy prices that have forced the shutdown of swaths of energy-intensive industrial production since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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