The survey, conducted by news magazine Der Spiegel, found that the 30 DAX companies cut 116,385 jobs this year, 45,354 of them in Germany alone. The news comes on the same day that the DAX reported a year-high of 6,000 points.

Most jobs were cut by the insurance giant Allianz, which employs 21,000 fewer people in Germany than it did a year ago – a 30 percent cut in its domestic workforce. Though most of these jobs were lost by the sale of Dresdner Bank, the majority of Dresdner Bank employees were kept on by the buyer, Commerzbank.

Several other German corporations numbered their domestic job cuts in the thousands during the year: car manufacturer Daimler lost 4,200, retailer Metro lost 3,800, steel corporation ThyssenKrupp lost 3,200, and technology giant Siemens lost 3,000.

But the figures are more dramatic on a global level: Siemens cut 20,000 worldwide, the national postal service Deutsche Post cut 18,000 and Daimler dropped 16,000.

But these figures were balanced a little by the job creations in other German companies. Apart from Commerzbank, which profited from the takeover of Dresdner Bank, the telecommunications market leader Deutsche Telekom created 32,000 jobs worldwide, and the airline Lufthansa created a further 11,000.

But all in all the number of job losses outstrips the gains among the DAX companies, by some 18,000 in Germany alone. Internationally, the balance comes to a negative of 20,000.

DAX company jobs in Germany have been slashed by 1.2 percent, while the number of jobs has only dropped by 0.6 percent overall worldwide. According to Der Spiegel, the figures show that German corporations are moving more and more of their jobs abroad.