Business Strategy –Glasbau Hahn could easily be mistaken for one of the auto repair shops or plumbing supply outlets that characterize a former factory district a few miles from Frankfurt’s banking quarter.

Yet the family-owned glassmaker, with 140 employees not counting a Hahn grandchild running loose around the front office, typifies the small, highly focused companies that may propel Germany back to growth.

The paradox is that such companies are also making life difficult for Germany’s European Union partners.

Glasbau Hahn is a miniature multinational, generating more than 60 percent of its sales abroad and dominating its narrow but lucrative niche: the global market for museum display cases. Even King Tut’s mummy lies in a climate-controlled vitrine made in Glasbau Hahn’s workshop, which sits inconspicuously next to a railyard and across the street from a Fiat showroom.

As Glasbau Hahn and thousands of other small German exporters rebound from a dreadful 2009, they give the European Union a much-needed shot of growth. Unfortunately, some of their success comes at the expense of countries like Greece, Spain and Portugal.

The so-called peripheral countries have racked up crushing debts in part because they bought too many Mercedes cars and other imports from Germany and elsewhere, without producing enough of their own export goods. In fact, goods from Greece, Spain and Portugal were often no longer competitive on world markets because in the past decade those countries had let wages rise faster than productivity and had become too expensive.

At the same time Germany, a country of savers, exported more than it consumed, profiting from its spendthrift neighbors but not reciprocating by buying equal amounts of imports. Read more »