Why Berlin?
"Berlin is perceived as a cool city for tech people, perhaps because it is more of a culture city than a financial one, and that makes it more interesting for entrepreneurs. It is also much easier to find a place to live than elsewhere and it is certainly cheaper to find office space. That is very much a driving factor."
Niklas Zennström, co-founder of Skype (Spiegel Online International, 11/2011)
- Roughly 5,700 IT companies with almost 50,000 employees and an annual turnover of more than € 10 billion
- Home of major international companies such as Siemens, IBM, Motorola, Oracle and eBay
- 20 of the 30 largest eBusiness firms in Germany have headquarters or offices in the region
- Largest pool of IT and telecommunication professionals in Germany
- Successful test market for new applications and services
- Site of the IFA, the world’s largest trade fair for consumer electronics
- Leading industry meeting place and home of the Berlin Web Week, Droidcon, LinuxTag
- Highly concentrated, state-of-the-art telecommunications infrastructure including several data processing centers
- Numerous initiatives and associations offer quick access to the regional and national IT sector.
- Close cooperation between science and industry at over 70 research institutions.
- Web 2.0 capital of Germany with a high number of social media companies
- Web-related events can be found at www.berlinwebweek.de
(Sources: Information from Berlin Partner GmbH, 2011)
Berlin is home to clusters of firms with expertise in the following fields:
