A current study by the market research company Lünedonk is addressing the development of the ten largest German IT freelancer agencies. According to it, the traditionally strong markets in Germany, whose turnover volume increased between 2008 and 2018 from one to 2.4 billion euros, grew by only 5.7% last year. This is considerably lower than the average for the previous five years, which was 13.1%.

As reasons for the fall, the survey cited legal insecurities arising from the reform of the German Law on Temporary Employment (AÜG) in 2017, which resulted in every tenth company stepping back from employing IT freelancers. This, combined with the increasing lack of IT specialists , has led in numerous places to project delays and threatens to damage the German economy overall: Due to the resulting skills shortages, many companies have fallen behind in tackling projects concerned with the digital transformation, which may leave them falling behind the international competition in the medium term.