ECJ EUROPEAN Cleaning Journal

ECJ reporter Alexandra Lachner takes a look at current trends in the German cleaning sector.

The building services sector in Germany is developing steadily:  both the number of cleaning hours and sales figures are showing a slight increase and there are a rising number of employment contracts subject to social security contributions in both full- and part-time work. Over 600,000 people (as at 2014) are employed and the annual turnover in 2016 was around €17 billion. So far, so good.  But how does the future look?

Christine Sudhop is deputy general manager of contract cleaning association BIV and foresees many challenges in the future. “The fact is in the major sectors of maintenance and window/façade cleaning, the market is already saturated; new areas for cleaning are of course always emerging but cleaning is often undertaken less frequently in order to cut costs.”

It’s clear specialised small companies have a powerful presence in the markets. “A relatively new area, for example, is the cleaning of photovoltaic installations. Some companies in the sector are moving towards customised services for specific manufacturing sectors,” reports Sudhop. Secondly, service providers are increasingly focused on continually expanding their portfolio by taking in cleaning-related services such as the maintenance of green spaces and winter services, thus offering a true full service package.

“So it is hardly surprising that the top 10 facility management firms include five companies which originally came from the cleaning sector. Any lack of expertise is remedied through acquisitions or mergers.”

A completely different but equally interesting opportunity might be provided by the private household sector, where an evaluation of market potential is more difficult. “We are experiencing a high level of competition here from illegal work. It is of course true that expectations are changing:  work-life balance, women going out to work, declining presence of extended family as a result of relocation, for example – all this leads to a greater need for professional help in the house.”

Trust can be a key success factor, as can reliability, since when a company has a regular booking, a temporary replacement can always be arranged if a particular cleaner is absent. “There is scope here for extension into the sphere of social services, for example where the care of the elderly is concerned, since the appropriate level of quality can in this case only be provided by professionally trained staff.”

Against the background of this market development, how is digitalisation – a central theme at this year’s WFBSC Congress in Berlin – to be seen?  “Digitalisation is as impossible to stop as the steam engine was. And it offers great opportunities for knowledge transfer and building automation, as our colleagues already recognise.” Digitalisation also brings with it the possibility of automation through robotics, a sensitive issue for labour intensive sectors.

Labour market developments and demographics must however also be considered. “Contrary to many gloomy forecasts, I can also foresee the real possibility of digitalisation and automation in certain sectors freeing up workers for employment in other areas,” declares Sudhop. “We are already experiencing today a glaring lack of trained staff which can perhaps at least partially be remedied in this way – there is room here for new approaches and directions.”