Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s administration is pushing Germany’s biggest companies to make sure their risks in China are manageable as part of broader efforts to reset relations with the Asian superpower.
The government is putting companies such as BASF, Volkswagen and Siemens on alert that they need to make sure they don’t get in too deep in case tensions escalate. The move — aimed at avoiding state bailouts — is part of a new strategy signed off by Scholz’s cabinet on Thursday designed to handle the world’s second-biggest economy more carefully.
"Companies must take geopolitical risks sufficiently into account in their decision making,” the government in Berlin said in the 40-page document published on the foreign ministry’s website. "The costs of concentration risks must be more strongly internalized on the part of companies so that state funds do not have to be tapped into in the event of a geopolitical crisis.”