bvdm — Bundesverband Druck und Medien (German Print & Media Federation)

It is the statistical programme of the Bundesverband Druck und Medien - the federation of Germany's print and media industry - normalised into a queryable dataset. The Branchenbericht is the flagship: an annual report, 59 pages in its 2024 edition, whose indicator tables put the print and media industry beside the whole of Verarbeitendes Gewerbe on firm counts, employees, nominal, domestic and foreign revenue, revenue per employee and per hour worked, compensation, wage share and hours worked. The statistical base is Statistisches Bundesamt data for establishments with 50 or more employees, credited as "Statistisches Bundesamt, Berechnungen BVDM".

The Konjunkturtelegramm publishes a business-climate index every month - July 2026 flagged a slight deterioration in the mood of the sector. The Druckindustrie portal carries the headline figures between annual editions: EUR 18.3 billion estimated revenue for 2025, around 6,000 companies of which the overwhelming majority are small or mid-sized - about 83% of firms have fewer than 20 socially insured workers - roughly 95,000 employees, and EUR 3.8 billion of print and publishing exports in 2025. A corporate financing survey runs annually, and since 2022 the Materialknappheitsindex has tracked material shortage pressure. Datadory delivers all streams in one schema.

Every record pairs an indicator, a value and where relevant a period. Real rows from the stream:

indicator : Umsatz                                value : 18,3 Mrd. Euro   period : 2025
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indicator : Branchenbericht 2023 table row        value : 444 firms; 55,748 employees;
                                                          EUR 10,145m nominal revenue; 22.0% wage share

The first row is the portal's 2025 revenue estimate - the topline anyone sizing the German market quotes. The second is one line of the Branchenbericht core table, the official-statistics layer underneath the headlines: 444 surveyed firms averaging 55,748 employees, EUR 10,145 million nominal revenue, wages at 22.0% of it. Portal topline above, surveyed indicator below is exactly how the two layers sit together in the feed. Get a sample of this dataset and the same schema lands cut to whichever years and indicators you name.

Eight fields define every record. Two carry the revenue economics - Umsatz nominal / Inlandsumsatz / Auslandsumsatz, Anteil Auslandsumsatz - and six carry the rest of the sector picture: firm and employee averages, productivity per employee and per hour worked, compensation and wage share, hours worked, and the monthly business-climate index. All eight were verified against the published Branchenbericht table structure during the research pass, so the dictionary below is the confirmed core rather than a reconstruction.

Geography - Germany throughout, national aggregates with regional structure available through the eight Landesverbaende. Every Branchenbericht table benchmarks print and media against all of Verarbeitendes Gewerbe, so the sector reads relative to German manufacturing rather than in isolation.

Temporal - cadence differs by stream and the feed preserves that rather than flattening it. The Branchenbericht lands annually, each edition covering the prior calendar year - the 2024 edition covers 2023 - giving a slow-moving structural baseline. The Konjunkturtelegramm lands monthly, so a year of climate readings is twelve observations deep. Price-index series run back to 2000.

Granularity - sector-level aggregates for the German print and media industry. The underlying survey circle is establishments with 50 or more employees, which is why the portal topline (about 6,000 companies) and the surveyed table (444 firms in 2023) differ in scale by design: one counts the industry, the other measures it.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

Your cadence is decoupled from publication rhythms upstream: take a one-time historical pull of past Branchenbericht editions, or keep a table current so each monthly Konjunkturtelegramm diffs cleanly into yesterday's rows. Deliveries arrive normalised to the field dictionary above, keyed on indicator and period, in JSON, CSV, spreadsheet-ready Excel tables or XML. Annual structure and monthly sentiment arrive in the same schema, so a market-sizing exercise and a demand-timing model read from one table instead of two formats.

• Market sizing and entry analysis - the EUR 18.3 billion 2025 topline, roughly 6,000 companies and 95,000 employees put a floor under any German print market model, with the Branchenbericht supplying the structural layer beneath.
• Export strategy - the domestic/foreign revenue split and export share track where German print demand comes from; EUR 3.8 billion of print and publishing exports in 2025 marks the cross-border exposure.
• Cost and wage-share surveillance - compensation totals and the Lohnquote (22.0% in 2023) give suppliers and their customers a read on where margin pressure sits before it reaches annual accounts.
• Productivity benchmarking - revenue per employee and per hour worked against all of manufacturing shows whether print is gaining or losing ground on the industrial average.
• Demand timing - the monthly Geschaeftsklimaindex turns printer sentiment into a leading indicator for order books, press utilisation and paper consumption planning.
• Input-cost and materials monitoring - Destatis producer-price indexes recalculated by the BVDM plus the Materialknappheitsindex flag substrate cost pressure as it builds.

Strategy and commercial leads at paper merchants, press manufacturers and print suppliers selling into Germany get Europe's largest print market in one schema - annual structure for sizing, monthly climate for timing. Investors and analysts covering European industrials and packaging get a sector series that benchmarks against German manufacturing rather than standing alone. Economists and policy researchers get official-statistics-derived indicators with the association's calculations attached and attributed. Procurement leads buying German print capacity get wage-share, price-index and material-shortage context for negotiating cycles.

Within commercial printing, this record owns the German practitioner-and-official-statistics layer: the sector's own federation publishing monthly sentiment on top of Destatis-derived structure. The neighbours sit elsewhere. The BPIF - British Printing Industries Federation does the equivalent job for the UK with quarterly survey evidence - pick it when the question is British printer sentiment. The US Census Bureau Economic Census, ASM and County Business Patterns record is the establishment-level American backbone - harder counts, slower cadence, no climate index. NAPIM - National Association of Printing Ink Manufacturers covers the ink supply side rather than the printing sector itself, and data.europa.eu — EU Open Data Portal for Commercial Printing aggregates European official portals. If the question is what is the German print sector doing this month, this is the record.

Three things worth settling upfront. First, cadence is uneven by design: the Branchenbericht is annual while the Konjunkturtelegramm is monthly, so tell us whether you want the slow structural map, the fast sentiment loop, or both joined - the schema supports either. Second, the surveyed indicator circle is establishments with 50 or more employees, so the Branchenbergericht tables measure the larger half of the industry while the portal topline counts all of it; name which layer you are quoting and the sample ships with the right one. Third, field names arrive in the original German - Umsatz, Beschaeftigte, Lohnquote - with English definitions alongside, so bilingual teams and translated deliverables both work.