German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Slovak Prime Minister Eduard Heger met in Berlin in mid June. (source: TASR)
Germany remains an important economic partner of Slovakia. While Slovakia continues to be an attractive location for German investments, Slovak companies consider Germany to be their most important trade partner.
“Germany is a strategic political and most important economic partner for Slovakia, and at present, it is also a defence and security partner,” Prime Minister Eduard Heger (OĽaNO) told the media on a plane to Berlin prior to his meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in mid-June.
Companies with German capital continue to contribute the most to the Slovak state budget, with their income and payroll taxes comprising 25 percent of the income, and payroll taxes paid by the Top 300 companies or 10 percent of the state budget in 2020, based on the annual TAXparency report of the tax and audit advisory company BMB Partners. The report, subtitled Who Finances the State, presented the Top 200 biggest Slovak non-financial companies and the Top 100 biggest Slovak financial companies for 2020.
“This shows how significantly the Slovak economy is interconnected with the German economy,” said Judita Kuchtová of BMB Partners when introducing the report last November.
The country is also one of the most important investors in Slovakia, with the carmaker Volkswagen Slovakia, the biggest private employer in Slovakia with 11,500 employees and total investments of €4.7 billion, probably the most known German company in Slovakia. But it is only one of about 490 companies with German capital operating in Slovakia and employing almost 139,000 people.
Another one, for example, is Evonik, which launched the construction of the world’s largest industrial facility to produce environmentally-friendly biosurfactants in Slovenská Ľupča in late June. Surfactants are foaming compounds that form the basis of most cleaning and hygiene products, but they are currently made mostly from fossil resources.
