8 in 10 German companies still fax, study finds — but, umm, why? #GeekLeap

Within the age of digital communication, fax machines appear as outdated as utilizing a rotary dial cellphone or a cassette tape. Give it some thought: if a colleague requested you to fax them a doc, you’d in all probability give them an incredulous look. However in Germany, fax machines haven’t been relegated to the historical past books simply but, analysis reveals.

Digital advocacy group Bitkom surveyed 505 corporations throughout the nation and located {that a} whopping 82% of them nonetheless fax. Notably, one-third of the respondents stated their use of the 180-year previous know-how is “frequent” or “very frequent.”

The depth of use, nonetheless, is regularly declining. Final yr, it was at 40%, down from 62% in 2018. Correspondingly, half of the businesses now ship faxes solely hardly ever or often, whereas 16% have stopped altogether. In accordance with Bitkom, this information reveals that faxing is — slowly however certainly — nearing its finish within the enterprise world.

To fax or to not fax?

However whatever the declining development in use, one query nonetheless stays: why use fax machines — properly past their heyday — as a substitute of merely emailing or cloud sharing?

“What’s most valued concerning the basic fax machine is above all its capacity to obviously hint whether or not one thing has been despatched,” stated Nils Britze, Bitkom’s head of digital enterprise processes.

Britze pointed to a different issue as properly: “As soon as a channel of communication has been established, it normally takes some time earlier than it’s fully changed — even when far more comfy and safer technique of communication have emerged.”

From a enterprise perspective this interprets to the problem of digitisation. In accordance with Bitkom’s earlier analysis, bigger corporations discover it simpler to go absolutely digital in comparison with small ones with lower than 100 staff. Particularly, 42% of enormous corporations surveyed had digitised their enterprise processes in 2021, whereas 94% of smaller corporations had been nonetheless utilizing paper.

From a private perspective, suspending the fax machine alternative refers to what Jonathan Coopersmith, Historical past Professor at Texas A&M College, calls “comfy inertia.” That’s, the folks’s tendency to stay to the acquainted, and in flip, their reluctance to vary applied sciences.

So plainly basic ol’ faxing nonetheless has some good years earlier than turning into a relic of the previous — at the least in Germany.