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Swiss tech industry faces deepening crisis: orders and exports plummet

tech industry switzerland
The downturn that began in the first half of 2023 worsened in the third quarter, Swissmem said in a press release on Thursday. “The industrial recession has reached the tech industry,” summarized the organisation. © Keystone / Christian Beutler

The situation in the Swiss tech industry is becoming more and more dire. While new orders came in increasingly sparsely in the third quarter, exports of goods and sales also fell.

The downturn that began in the first half of 2023 worsened in the third quarter, Swissmem said in a press release on Thursday. “The industrial recession has reached the tech industry,” summarized the organisation.

From July to September, incoming orders fell by 10.5% compared to the same quarter of the previous year. Over the entire first nine months, orders fell by 9.9%.

+Dark clouds on the horizon for Swiss industry

The negative development was also noticeable in sales in the third quarter. They fell by 1.5% compared to the previous year. From January to September, sales stagnated overall (-0.1%).

Goods exports from the Swiss tech industry fell by 2.5% in the first nine months of 2023. According to Swissmem, they still reached a value of CHF52.7 billion ($59.3). In the third quarter of 2023 alone, the decline in goods exports was 5.5%.

Since this year, Swissmem has been calling the industry the tech industry and no longer the MEM industry, but it basically means the same thing. The umbrella organization sees itself as a representative of the mechanical, electrical and metal industries (MEM) and related technology sectors. This includes Swissmem, for example, sensors, photonics, robotics, additive manufacturing and industrial communication technology (ICT).

This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. You can find them here. 

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