Germany’s forward-looking initiatives and offerings know no borders

Ready for take-off! Airport Region Berlin Brandenburg - a world-class region for business and technology

The Airport Region Berlin Brandenburg is one of the most dynamic economic regions in Germany and a world-class location for innovative businesses.

It stretches from Berlin city center to the south of the city and right up to the municipalities around Berlin Brandenburg Airport (BER). The Airport Region Team, made up of staff from Berlin Partner for Business and Technology and the Economic Development Agency Brandenburg (WFBB), promotes the region around the world. It targets to attract a mix of industrial companies, startups, and research institutions, drawing a high added value to the region in terms of jobs and investment volumes. 

Tasked to be the first point of contact for companies interested in settling in the region, the Airport Region Team offers a wide range of services: providing support with financing and funding options, finding commercial locations and staff. What’s more, the team connects companies to the region’s business ecosystem, allowing them to tap into excellent business and science networks, facilitating the process of bringing innovations to market.

“Following the opening of BER airport in October 2020, and the major investment of Tesla in the direct vicinity, the Airport Region is experiencing a growth spurt that will radiate far beyond the region”, said Dr. Steffen Kammradt, CEO of WFBB.

The excellent infrastructure with BER airport as a gateway to international markets gives a glimpse of what the region has to offer. Combining location advantages of two states, the region boasts high-profile business locations, innovative technology centers, a large catchment area with international talent and the highest number of academics in Germany.

“We are already registering settlement projects that can be attributed to the region’s excellent location advantages. Companies such as SAP and Amazon benefit from and contribute to the economic boom of the region, entailing further company settlements”, said Dr. Stefan Franzke, CEO of Berlin Partner.

No matter the size or industry, all companies wishing to establish their business on a strong footing are just in the right place in the Airport Region Berlin Brandenburg.

If you are interested in setting up or expanding your business in the Airport Region Berlin Brandenburg, please get in touch with us, we are happy to answer all your questions. Have a look at our website here.

The road to electric mobility runs from Germany to Singapore

The German car manufacturing leader, Audi, is blazing a trail in Singapore with the introduction of the fully electric vehicle (EV) Audi e-tron SUV to the local market last year.

Spurred by the Singapore government’s recent announcements to support more sustainable transport operations and infrastructure, the city state’s journey toward adopting electric vehicles was given a jump start this 2021. A positive stakeholder response to incentivise the adoption of electric vehicles—including those from energy providers, building landlords, and car brands—is ensuring that consumers can easily transition to EVs.

This development is similar to the European narrative, including Norway, where the e-tron has overtaken sales of combustion engine cars to become a top-selling EV.

“Interest in our Audi e-tron fully-electric models have markedly increased this year,” said Markus Schuster, managing director of Audi Singapore. “With the mix of incentives and infrastructure build-up, we may be at a tipping point for EVs sooner rather than later.”

The premium large SUV e-tron boasts sporty and practical features, including two electric motors, an electric all-wheel drive for agile handling, and a high-voltage battery that offers charging options for the home and on the move.

“In the e-tron, the quattro system is made even more responsive and is able to be even more precise in delivering just the right amount of drive to each wheel. The result is a stunning driving experience,” Schuster added.

The Audi e-tron portfolio in Singapore today consists of the Audi e-tron, e-tron Sportback, e-tron GT, and RS e-tron GT. This expands the Audi offerings locally—from premium compact models to SUVs, sports cars to limousines—cementing the company’s commitment to respond to the changing needs of its customers and the environment.

Audi aims to play a global role in sustainable mobility to help reduce the environmental impact of its business activity. For one, it is transitioning its manufacturing facilities around the world to be carbon neutral.

“We have been making consistent and incremental steps to improve the overall efficiency of our products across the board. For example, the latest Audi A3 that we launched in May this year is more frugal yet more refined than the model it replaces. We don’t wait till everyone changes to an EV to deliver real-world benefits to our customers and the consumers,” Schuster explained.

Financial evolution vital to achieve business goals

Tougher competition and volatile market conditions in modern business times are increasingly pressuring organisations to adapt. To be able to act quickly, financial changes or impacts must be able to be linked to the underlying operational processes and drivers in order to understand, measure, and control the long-term success of the organisation.

Fortunately, finance leaders are no longer relegated to the traditional number-crunching role and now take the lead in the financial evolution within their organisations. Today’s chief financial officers extend best practices to functional leaders in the planning process, to help the businesses reach overall financial goals.

“In recent times, finance has started moving away from the traditional role of gathering data, maintaining spreadsheets, and building reports to the role of a chief value officer where it is about delivering actionable insights and simplifying complex planning processes,” according to Mark Velthuis, president, Asia Pacific at Jedox. “The CFO is a business partner to the CEO and acts as a role model for everyone in Finance,” Velthuis added.

Jedox is a cloud-based Enterprise Performance Management solution company with a strong focus in planning, forecasting, reporting, and analysis. It enables organisations to embark on financial transformation by better measuring key performance indicators, as well as analysing and planning their own efficiency and effectiveness in each business area, department, and market segment.

Amongst Jedox’s offerings are solutions for integrated financial planning, financial budgeting and forecasting, cost center and HR planning, cost allocation and profitability analysis, predictive forecasting and planning, sales and operational planning, territory planning and sales quotas, sales incentives and compensation, and financial consolidation

These automated solutions aim to consolidate processes, eliminate errors, reduce labor-intensive work, and expedite planning cycles to create more time for value-added strategic work.

Key to embarking on a financial transformation, Velthuis explained, is evolving the finance process and extending planning and analysis practices beyond the office of the CFO to all functional areas of business.

“Establish a business partnering mindset in the organisation – good business partnering improves the quality of business decisions and ensures that decisions lead to impactful action.”

Velthuis said, adding that embracing modern technology is also critical to leveraging the wealth of value hidden in data. “Technology is a catalyst for your business operating model. Systems and applications age, what used to work before may no longer be sufficient today as business grows with time.”

He emphasised that in the fast-changing world of business, organizations must understand how to derive the most knowledge they can from their data. Manually combined, traditional excel spreadsheets, pivot tables, and various operational systems—whilst foundational in holding the data—are no longer enough.

“In reality, it is often associated with time-consuming and error-prone processes.” On the other hand, having a unified process for financial and operational data across the organisation breaks down data silos and ensures that all important data is always centrally available and up to date.