> You'll find many of these companies in rural regions.
In so much of the developed world we're becoming more and more politically split along urban/rural lines, is this the case in Germany is does their distributed industry even things out?
Growing larger cities is also a trend in Germany. Especially the young mobile population moves to cities to study at universities. Cities are also attractive for their infrastructure.
Small and medium sized towns often (not always) struggle with that and are looking into ways to become more attractive...
Just imagine, Adidas (sports, revenue 21 billion Euro), Puma (sports, 4.6 billion Euro revenue) and Schaeffler (14 billion Euro revenue, from manufacturing) have their home in Herzogenaurach, a small town in Bavaria with 23k population.
It has always been a struggle and after reunification federal focus has shifted, naturally thethe rural/urban imbalance took the backseat to the easy/west imbalance, city or not. But a lot of anti-centralistic intertia has remained, and a lot of the political fight against rural/urban split was on state level anyways. The split is growing in Germany just like everywhere else, but it probably hasn't proceeded as far yet.
In so much of the developed world we're becoming more and more politically split along urban/rural lines, is this the case in Germany is does their distributed industry even things out?