Fifteen thousand jobs. Every month. That is the figure the president of the Federation of German Industries, Tanja Gönner, used to describe the current state of German industry.

The causes she names are geopolitical: American tariff policy and China's growing industrial power, which puts additional pressure on German companies. The federation she leads brings together around 100,000 companies employing more than eight million people, which means her assessment is not the voice of one sector but of almost the entire German industrial base.

Gönner believes there is room for recovery if Germany takes timely measures, and she sees the key in investment in modern technologies, especially artificial intelligence. That is the standard formula of industry associations everywhere - when the numbers are bad, the solution is always investment in the future.

The problem with that formula is that a job which vanished this month does not come back because some company buys an algorithm next year. Artificial intelligence in manufacturing means, above all, fewer people on the line, not more. If that is the answer to losing 15,000 jobs a month, then the answer and the problem are heading the same way.

For the Balkans this is not distant news from another continent. For decades Germany has been the final destination for workers from this region and the main market for parts made in Macedonian and Serbian automotive component plants. When German industry loses 15,000 jobs a month, nobody publishes that as news from Štip or Kumanovo - but the orders placed with subcontractors are the first thing to shrink.

Is anyone in this country reading German statistics as domestic ones? At the very least, the people planning new industrial zones should be.