Frankfurt, 17 April 2026 – Commenting on the EU’s plans to extend the CO₂ border adjustment mechanism, VDMA Executive Director Thilo Brodtmann says:

• “We have surveyed more than 300 of our member companies and the result is clear: the CBAM mechanism poses a threat to the existence of the entire machinery and equipment manufacturing industry in Europe.”

• “We therefore call for the entire CBAM mechanism to be abolished or at least fundamentally revised. The plans to extend it to additional industrially processed products must be stopped.”

• “CBAM acts effectively like a tariff on key intermediate products for the machinery and equipment manufacturing sector. Companies must report specific emissions data – but do not receive this data from their suppliers outside the EU. Consequently, they have to work with inflated default values – and are forced to purchase significantly more CBAM certificates.”

• “CBAM massively increases the prices of materials and components used in machinery and equipment. These additional costs must be offset in exports so that companies remain competitive on global markets – a crucial point for an industry that exports more than 50 per cent of its products to countries outside the single market.”

• “In this situation, many companies feel compelled to act: around 40 per cent of those asked in the survey are considering relocating their production or parts of assembly lines to non EU countries due to CBAM. This threatens significant job losses. More than a third of the companies surveyed expect job cuts, and around one in ten companies state that this puts more than a quarter of their jobs at risk.”

• “This misguided regulation is all the more damaging given that our industry provides the technologies necessary for a climate-friendly and resilient EU. Climate protection through technology is the core business of the machinery and equipment manufacturing sector. However, this can only succeed if this industrial value creation and the associated jobs are maintained in Europe.”

Do you have any questions? Anna Feldman, CBAM expert at the VDMA, anna.Feldman@vdma.eu , will be happy to answer them.

The VDMA represents 3,500 German and European companies in the machinery and equipment manufacturing sector. The industry stands for innovation, export orientation and small and medium-sized enterprises. The companies employ a total of around 3 million people across the EU-27, more than 1.2 million of whom are in Germany alone. This makes machinery and equipment manufacturers the largest employer among capital goods industries, both in the EU-27 and in Germany. It accounts for an estimated turnover of around 900 billion euros in the European Union. Around 80 per cent of the machinery sold in the EU originates from a manufacturing facility within the single market.