Star products from Germany
Products designed and made in Germany that defined their category or are used around the world, with the engineering story behind each one.
11 products
Celonis process mining
Software from a Munich university spin-off that reconstructs how business processes really run from the event data in systems such as SAP, then helps fix them.
DCF77 time signal
The long-wave radio signal from Mainflingen near Frankfurt that carries Germany's legal time to station clocks, traffic lights, power grids and household radio-controlled clocks across Europe.
DeepL Translator
Neural machine translation from Cologne, released in August 2017 and known for translations that read naturally rather than word for word.
FLUX image models
Text-to-image AI models from Black Forest Labs of Freiburg, released from August 2024 by the researchers behind Stable Diffusion, in open and commercial versions.
H.264, HEVC and VVC video coding contributions
Fraunhofer HHI in Berlin helped lead and shape the video compression standards behind streaming, Blu-ray era HD and 4K TV, from H.264/AVC to HEVC and the 2020 standard VVC.
JUPITER exascale supercomputer
Europe's first exascale supercomputer, at Jülich. It reached 1.000 exaflop per second on the TOP500 benchmark in November 2025, the first system outside the United States to do so.
MP3 audio format
The audio compression format developed largely at Fraunhofer IIS in Erlangen, fixed as an MPEG standard in 1992 and named .mp3 in 1995, which made digital music portable.
SAP S/4HANA
SAP's enterprise resource planning suite built for its in-memory HANA database, launched in 2015 as the successor to SAP's earlier ERP systems.
TeamViewer
Remote access software from Göppingen, first released in 2005, that lets a technician see and control a computer anywhere in the world.
Zuse Z3
Konrad Zuse's relay computer, presented in Berlin on 12 May 1941, widely regarded as the first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer. The original was lost in a 1943 air raid.
n8n workflow automation
A Berlin-built automation platform, launched in 2019, where users connect apps, data and AI models in a visual editor and can host it themselves.
Product stories
The German inside: what Germany builds into your car, your flight and the data centre
Your car may be Japanese or Italian, your airliner Airbus or Boeing. Inside both, and in the data centres behind them, sit German gearboxes, seals, bearings, chips, turbines, landing gear and racks.
Germany's strangest world champions: the small firms that quietly own odd niches
Ship propellers from a lake town, Christmas stars from a church village, the trolley sketched on a flight home. A tour of German niche champions and the stories behind them.
Inside your smartphone: the German parts nobody sees
No phone sold today carries a German brand of note, yet German sensors, liquid crystals, glass and silicon sit inside a great many of them. A walk up the supply chain, from Reutlingen to Burghausen.
Mittelstand icons: Thermomix, Playmobil, HARIBO and Steiff, and what keeps them German
Four beloved consumer brands, four family-shaped histories. Their products are global, and some are now largely made abroad. So what is German about them? Ownership, headquarters and a habit of patience.
Medtech made in Germany: scanners, ventilators, prosthetics and the lab bench
From imaging in Erlangen to anaesthesia in Lübeck, prosthetics in Duderstadt and lab equipment in Hamburg and Göttingen, German firms supply much of modern medicine's hardware.
The energy transition's hardware: turbines, inverters and electrolysers made in Germany
Wind turbines from Aurich and Rostock, solar inverters from northern Hesse, electrolysers from Dresden and grid equipment from Siemens Energy. Who builds the physical kit of decarbonisation.
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