Grußwort: Einweihung Telekom Capital Partners (englisch)
Dear Mr Vento
Dear Mr Höttges
Ladies and Gentleman
I am extremely pleased that you have invited me to be with you today and I am happy that you are here. You have already done the right thing just by deciding on Hamburg as your venue!
Hamburg is traditionally a place for innovation, a place for new beginnings. It is on this very spot the place where you will be providing support for innovative founders and companies in the future that highly innovative decisions were made in past decades that were of great significance for that particular period in time. In about the year 1860, the developers of the port were faced with a decision: Should the Port of Hamburg be made into a wet dock? With locks, following the example of London? Or should it become an open tidal port, where goods can be turned over without lengthy storage, one that would be supported by mechanical means like cranes and a railway link? The decision was made in favour of greater scalability and a higher degree of technologisation the open tidal port. It was a smart decision. Later, in the 1950s, another decision was taken that would ensure its future viability. The port was retrofitted for container shipping, veering away from piece goods and the like. Again and again, decisions like these have made the city fit for the future, at the same time shaping and forming it. Entire sections of the city have changed completely. In the noughties, by around the year 2000, the village of Altenwerder grew from the residential area it still was in the 1960s into one of the worlds most modern container terminals. Now developing in the middle of the city on the former port site is the new HafenCity, one of the most modern and perhaps the most attractive metropolitan districts in the world.
We explicitly invite innovators to see Hamburg as a laboratory for modernity, and to use it as such. As a major city, we want to promote projects in collaboration with technology providers, which are generally private enterprises. The new delivery robot from Hermes, the package delivery firm, for example, is currently being tested in our city. The city is working with VW, BMW and Mercedes on various questions regarding future urban mobility and the goal of introducing zero emission public transport to the city more quickly.
But at the same time, we are also purposefully supporting innovations and the development of technologies in Hamburg. With the Centre for Applied Aviation Research, for example where, among other things, highly advanced research is being conducted on production processes that are generally referred to as 3D printing or the Research and Innovation Park (F&I-Parks) which is being built, or Masterplan Industrie 4.0, the Investment and Development Bank, our cluster policy, and initiatives like nextMedia.Hamburg, which works with the media and digital scene. These are all examples of how we promote innovation.
In the development of new especially digital technologies, start-up companies are also playing an increasingly important role in Hamburg. With 25 start-ups per 1,000 working persons, the start-up quota has again shown a slight improvement over the previous year. According to the KfW Start-Up Monitor, Hamburg thus remains high up in the ranking of the German states or Länder.
In comparison with the national average, however, total start-ups in 2015 unfortunately declined somewhat. There are many reasons for this. Compared with other countries, for example, Germany does not demonstrate a positive approach to failure. While there is a stigma associated with failures here, in leading start-up nations like the USA and Israel, they are seen simply as experience. And where failure is not regarded as part of ones personal development in becoming an entrepreneur, it is not surprising that the start-up figures are sinking.
In regard to the hard parameters as noted by the German Start-Up Monitor for the year 2015 the topics of marketing and financing, followed by human resources, are by far the most significant challenges for young companies today. In the area of financing, the current figures from Ernst & Young show that venture capital investments in Europe in the first half of 2016 fell slightly in comparison with the same period in the previous year, to 6.4 billion euros. The number of transactions has risen slightly. A similar picture is also seen in the figures for Germany. While this is a positive development, it still doesnt compare with that of the US.
This makes us all the more pleased that, with Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners, a company has come to the Elbe that can offer solutions for challenges like these. It closes a disturbing gap in the growth track of aspiring companies. DTCP will be endowed with a fund of 450 Million Euros for a period of 5 years. You dont only invest in young companies, but also in middle-sized and big corporations that have been asserting themselves on the market for a while. Such promising enterprises can be found especially in the digital sector. We all know their names, yet sometimes they only generate moderate profits for long periods of time. So, while they are in fact successful companies, their future depends on private investments. In Germany, it has so far been difficult to finance the development of these companies. Measured against the Gross National Product, venture capital investments in the US are seven times those of Germany. Obviously, we have a serious backlog demand and potential. In this context, DTCP stands for a new dynamic impulse out of Hamburg. With its know-how, its experience, its network and supported by the sixth largest telecommunications company in the world DTCP will naturally contribute a great deal to the growth of innovative companies.
Many Hamburg start-ups have grown into successful companies that operate internationally. These include InnoGames, Kreditech, myTaxi and Xing. The list is naturally much longer, and we are very confident that it will continue to grow. Start-ups in Hamburg are characterized by clear economic perspectives. The goal that is pursued from a very early stage and with great professionalism is to use good ideas to earn good money. The tradition of our old mercantile city is thus being carried forth persistently in new fields of business.
Of course, we not only promote technical innovations and developments. We also make use of them. We want to continue to optimise the infrastructure of our city and its public spaces through digital interfaces and offers. These include educational and cultural opportunities, as well as systems for an integrated transport strategy and an intelligent energy supply. We are already in the process of working up concrete offers in these areas. Very close to where we are now, the City Science Lab a combination Think Tank and research unit is being built. It is based on a collaboration between HafenCity University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). And our universities are also establishing a Hamburg Open Online University, a place where knowledge can be accessed online at any time, night or day.
Digitalisation is already very advanced at the port which is no longer located in the north of the Elbe, but is spreading out in the south on the Northern Elbe. In part with the support of Deutsche Telekom, we have submitted our application to host the ITS World Congress 2021, a congress that revolves around intelligent transport systems. Hamburg would like to use this congress as a platform for opening its intelligent transport strategies to a broad public. Hamburg is the European leader in the use of car-sharing options, and we also utilise the first fully electrical buses in local public transport.
Not least, this naturally also includes the fact that we are working toward offering administrative services digitally to begin with. We are calling that digital first". For our citizens and companies, this means that they will be able to avail themselves of government services easily and comfortably, with little effort and cost, reliably and quickly, and regardless of the place and time. We are already used to doing so for other services, airline bookings and banking. In many ways, this is a challenging prospect. Just think of the question of required signatures, and you will grasp the changes to the status quo this idea will require. But I am optimistic about the fact that technical developments will provide the solutions we need to meet all of these challenges.
So this was just a brief outline of what we are planning for Hamburg as a Digital City. You will be experiencing it, for you are here in this city, in these beautiful offices.
For now, there is not much for me to add. Let me just congratulate you and wish you much success for the future. For you and for myself I hope that you will always be able to find a wise balance between long-term growth opportunities for young companies and your own profitability targets. But I am certain that you would not have come to Hamburg if you thought any differently. And with the new move into the Telekom campus in the CityNord district, some nine kilometres from here, German Telekom have set a further significant sign. There you will be instituting a progressive office concept combined with the progressive Future Work concept both of which symbolize new beginnings. In a city that has always rewarded new beginnings.
Welcome to Hamburg. Great that you are here. All the best to you!
Many thanks!
Es gilt das gesprochene Wort.
Grußwort: Einweihung Telekom Capital Partners (German version)