"Lilium is not a good witness for the problems of the location with future industries.
The Bavarian start-up Lilium is on the verge of collapse. What will happen to the technology of the developer of electric vertical take-off aircraft is uncertain. Malice is inappropriate here - Germany needs many more courageous founders like those from Lilium, even if not all ideas work out.
The Lilium case has sparked a debate about how Germany deals with future technologies, driven by Lilium co-founder Daniel Wiegand, who immediately explained the decision about his company as a location issue in an interview with the FAZ. The start-up association, together with a group of prominent high-tech founders, also campaigned for a state guarantee for Lilium. This debate is important. But the Bavarian company is not a good witness. Saving Lilium would have been the wrong approach. Something else is needed.
What is true is that in view of the structural crisis in many German Core industries - keyword automotive industry - Germany would do well to produce more promising companies in future-oriented sectors: quantum computing, robotics, nuclear fusion or space travel are just a few examples. These so-called deeptech sectors have one thing in common: they require excellent scientific fundamental work and talented engineers. Germany has both. In recent years, ecosystems of young, science-driven founders have emerged around practice-oriented universities such as those in Munich, Aachen or Darmstadt. The pipeline of good ideas for highly complex technical problems is full. And at the beginning there is enough money in Germany for such deeptech start-ups through state funding, but above all through private venture capital. This is changing for those start-ups that are successful - and therefore need larger sums for expansion. Financing rounds beyond 100 million euros are still difficult to achieve in this country.
Lilium had actually already overcome this hurdle; raising 1.5 billion euros is the exception rather than the rule. Lilium did not fail because private investors were not prepared to invest large sums of money in principle. It was because they apparently lost confidence in the start-up at some point. But it is not the state's job to compensate for this with taxpayers' money. In addition to technical doubts, there are also fundamental arguments against state support for Lilium: If the state saves a start-up with taxpayers' money, the door is wide open for further rescue operations. Anyone who does not think the state is a better entrepreneur should be skeptical about this. Instead of arbitrarily plugging financial holes in individual companies only when they appear, the state should rather help ensure that all promising deeptech companies have better access to private capital.
The greatest lever for this lies in mobilizing the enormous investment volume of German insurers and banks for the venture capital market. In the USA, a good 70 percent of venture capital comes from pension funds and foundations. In Germany, this mass of pension funds does not exist due to the pay-as-you-go pension system. However, if German insurers were to invest at least a small part of the billions they manage in start-ups, that would be a major lever. The federal government's "WIN Initiative" in conjunction with the state development bank KfW and some large insurers, banks and industrial groups is taking an important step in this direction, but it cannot stop there. The companies have committed to investing twelve billion euros by 2030. The start-up association and KfW are calculating 30 billion euros annually for innovation financing. In addition, it would be desirable if more family offices were to discover the high-yield asset class of venture capital for themselves, as is already the case in the United States.
Of course, no deeptech start-ups in the USA and certainly not in China can get by without state money. Germany can also do more here, but not by having the state plug the financing gaps of selected individual companies. A good mechanism is the Agency for Breakthrough Innovations (SPRIND), which, after some initial difficulties, is now doing good work." [1]
1. Die Lehren aus dem Fall Lilium. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; Frankfurt. 30 Oct 2024: 17. Von Maximilian Sachse
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