Turns out the cliche is painfully true: according to a new survey, a third of German companies still regularly use fax machines for work.

Fax machines well and truly alive in Germany

Of Germany’s administrative trials and tribulations, finding a working fax machine is apparently not one. Research published this week by the German digital advocacy group Bitkom has revealed that a painful 82 percent of companies in the federal republic still use fax machines.

The fax machine is indebted to Germany for prolonging its life well into the 21st century. "Faced with the shift to digital, the fax machine has long been considered doomed," the head of digital business processes at Bitkom, Nils Britze, said in a statement on the group’s website.

But fax machine usage is still dying out

"Once a channel of communication has been established, it generally takes a while before it is completely superseded — even when much more comfortable and safer means of communication have emerged in the meantime," Britze added.

The beginning of the end has come and gone for the humble German fax; with 82 percent of companies still loyal, the middle of the beginning of the end is perhaps, just around the corner. 

Despite the system being relatively outmoded, people still love to fax. A third of companies that responded to Bitkom told the advocacy group that they use the devices “frequently” or “very frequently”. But they do at least love to fax a tad less than in recent years, with a stunning 62 percent of companies saying that they used the machine “frequently” or “very frequently” in 2018.

Only 16 percent of responding companies told Bitkom that they were en vogue and never use faxes.

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