At the beginning of this year, German industrial packaging suppliers are still benefitting from a brisk pace of export activity, especially in the domestic machine-engineering and electrical sectors. In the first quarter of 2012, many packaging companies were still handling orders received last year. According to information from industrial packaging companies, this enabled sales in the first four months to be held more or less on par with those of the same period in 2011. Current capacity utilisation as well as the levels for the remainder of the second quarter are still being described as comparatively high but they are likely to decline slightly again during the course of the third quarter as a result of somewhat slower receipts of orders at the start of this year.