The results of a representative survey conducted and recently released by Siemens Financial Services in Cooperation with the University of Augsburg and TNS EMNID have shown that liquidity requirements are increasingly causing German companies to look for alternatives to bank loans.
Unlike their peers in the US and the UK, which tend to limit the use of bank loans for bridge financing and short term funds, most German companies are still primarily bank-financed. Acute liquidity bottlenecks – above all amongst SMEs – and fears of an excessive dependence on banks have now set off the long-awaited structural change in German financing.
