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Monday, Nov. 20, 2000
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Off the Beaten Track
Welcome to the Content Metropolis
This venerable Hanseatic port has shed its Old Economy image to become Germany's hottest city for digital media
By URSULA SAUTTER Hamburg
Hamburg Portraits:
Oliver Sinner | Ursula Triller | Aaron Koenig
The thousand or so men and women gathered for the quarterly Captains' Meeting on board the Cap San Diego in Hamburg's harbor are an unusual bunch. They're not wearing uniforms or talking about bilges and barges. Instead, they're discussing software, html and the future of the Web. The crowd on this former freighter now turned into a maritime museum belong to the rapidly growing crew of Online Captains, Internet entrepreneurs who have turned this bustling northern German port city into the country's leading new media center.
Since the early 1990s, almost 1,000 multimedia agencies, e-commerce companies, digital publishers and other Net enterprises have been founded in Hamburg. Attracted by the city's can-do spirit and pool of IT talent, more and more global Web players like AOL and marchFIRST, one of the world's largest InterNet services companies, are also setting up shop here. The IT influx has helped bring unemployment down from 12.6% in 1998 to 8.3% in September. "Hamburg is an emporium for new media," says Christoph Schmidt, director of the e-Business Innovation Center that U.S. computer giant IBM opened in Hamburg's hip dockyard district Speicherstadt last spring. "That's what makes it so attractive to e-people."
The rise of the New Economy in this 1,200-year-old Hanseatic city has a lot to do with the persistence of the Old Economy. An important center of newspaper, periodical and book publishing and home to many of Germany's top advertising agencies and film companies, "Hamburg is a metropolis of content," says the city's economics senator Thomas Mirow. "This is fertile ground for the development of new media." So successful are Hamburg's new media firms that every third click on a German website lands on a page that has been created here.
Budding enterprises can also profit from newmedia@work, an information and business promotion program founded in 1998 by the city's economics authority and several Hamburg-based companies. This public-private partnership provides financial support, venture capital contacts and plenty of useful business data to fledgling entrepreneurs. Instead of having to fend for themselves in the difficult months before and after start-up, Hamburg's young dotcoms tap into a rich lode of both theoretical expertise and on-the-job experience. "This has made the time-to-market phase much shorter than in places like Munich or Berlin," boasts Uwe Jens Neumann, head of newmedia@work.
Like the rest of Germany, Hamburg is in dire need of skilled workers for the new media sector — an estimated 6,000 jobs are vacant. But in contrast to many other cities, Hamburg has taken the initiative in trying to swell its IT workforce. Since March, college and university graduates have been able to obtain a "multimedia driver's license" by attending a 12-month course that teaches them the basics of computer programming, graphic design and project management. In early 2001, the privately financed MediaCity.Academy, Germany's first ever training center for Web managers, will open its doors.
Despite the continuing boom of its multimedia sector, however, all is not sunshine and light in Hamburg. It could prove dangerous to neglect the city's old economy — mostly aircraft construction, oil processing, mechanical engineering and shipbuilding — in favor of the new. During the last three decades, the industrial sector in the city has steadily declined. "We've reached a level which shouldn't drop any further if we don't want to upset the balance between production and services," argues Werner Marnette, ceo of copper producers Norddeutsche Affinerie. The reason is simple, he believes. "One industrial job secures two jobs in the secondary and tertiary sector." If Hamburg manages to nurture its industrial and digital strengths, the city could well become Germany's main interface with both the old and new economies.
Check out timeeurope.com for more Fast Forward Europe stories in the days and weeks to come. Our Fast Forward coverage culminates in a year-end special issue and website to be published on December 14
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