Yes, but an export country like Germany should then be even more affected, shouldn't it ? - I mean they will face both slowdown in production and also in trade (and granted the trade factor being of less importance than for Dutch).

Yes and no. It depends on what market both nations are catering to. The Netherlands is the gateway to Europe, nearly everything you buy from China et al has been traded through Rotterdam or Amsterdam. Our customer base is mostly Europe (and to a lesser extend the United States). As the continent slumped, so did our sales. Germany, on the other hand, sold a lot of stuff to the Asian economies that were less affected, and kept growing.

When I worked for a Finnish (very large) company, the only person we would address with "Sir" was the CEO.

This is the exact same here. No one uses the formal here.

I am not sure I understand what you mean on this one - shouldn't internet/digitization bring you guys a competitive advantage over Germany ?

Again, yes and no. In the general digital economy, we definitely outperform Germany. But the transition to the digital economy did have some (pretty large) damaging effects, which happened to coincide with the crisis. Pre-crisis NL had a large retail sector, and more and more stores kept being built until the crisis hit. After everyone started buying online, those stores were hit hard, and massive layoff after massive layoff followed. It's not over yet. Just a few months ago, another big chain (V&D) went bankrupt, with another 10,000 employees on the streets. It is estimated we still have a surplus of about 20% in stores.