LONDON: Andreas Meyer-Schwickerath, Managing Director of the British Chamber of Commerce in Germany (BCCG), exposes the stakes and consequences if Britain votes to leave the European Union in 2017 in an interview with The Local.
Meyer-Schwickerath has been working at the BCCG since 2003, coming from a background in industry and banking.
In that time, he’s seen growth in trade between Germany and the UK balloon.
Figures from UK Trade and Investment (UKTI), the British government’s trade promotion body, show that bilateral business has increased by 21 percent since 2009, to £43 billion (€59.16 billion), making the Federal Republic the UK’s largest European trading partner.
British companies employ 200,000 people in Germany and represent one tenth of all the foreign businesses present in the country.
On the German side, the UK was behind only France and the United States in its appetite for the country’s exports in 2014, splashing out almost €85 billion according to statistics from the Federal Statistics Office (Destatis).
And Germany spent almost half as much money as it earned from selling to the UK on buying British products.
Those numbers are big enough to make the British government’s plans for a referendum on leaving the EU, if its demands of fellow members for a renegotiation of the relationship aren’t met, a serious concern to business people on both sides.
