Comment by torginus

My guess would be that big German companies like to sell and insure their industrial equipment wholesale. For example, if you buy stuff from Siemens, everything in the factory must be as per how the applications engineer described it - which is to mean you have to buy everything from them and set it up exactly as they want - otherwise there goes your insurance/warranty.

This isn't exactly cheap, it's worth it for the big players, but needless to say, I'm not exactly enamored with the practice.