Pforzheim - Economy and Infrastructure

Economy and Infrastructure

Pforzheim is one of the regional centers (Oberzentrum) in Baden-Württemberg and has one of the highest densities of industrial activity in the state.

Pforzheim is historically an important jewelry and watch-making centre in Germany. Due to this reason, Pforzheim is nicknamed as Golden City. Jewelry and watch-making industry is first set up by Jean François Autran after receiving an edict from then overlord Margrave Karl Friedrich von Baden. This enterprise is later joined by other commercial enterprises and helped Pforzheim to become an important manufacturing city. Pforzheim accounts for just under 70 percent of the total sales of the German jewelry and silverware industry and around 80 percent of all the pieces of jewelry exported by Germany come from Pforzheim.

However, a smaller fraction of the economy nowadays is dedicated to producing the traditional products of watches and jewellery. Only 11,000 people are employed in the jewelry and watch-making industries. Two thirds of all employment positions are made available in the areas of metal processing, dental industry electronics and electro-technology. The mail order companies (Bader, Klingel, Wenz) with their sales volumes in the order of millions of Euros occupies a leading position in Germany. Tourism is gaining importance. In this respect the city benefits from its favorable Three-Valleys location at the gateway to the Black Forest, and related to this, from the starting points of a large number of hiking, cycling and waterway routes. The European long-distance trail E1 passes through Pforzheim. It is also the starting point of the Black Forest Hiking Routes Westweg, Mittelweg and Ostweg.

Read more about this topic:  Pforzheim

Famous quotes containing the words economy and and/or economy:

    It enhances our sense of the grand security and serenity of nature to observe the still undisturbed economy and content of the fishes of this century, their happiness a regular fruit of the summer.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get “a good job,” but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)