ASIC means Application-Specific-Integrated-Circuit (ASIC). An ASIC Miner is a special hardware chip that has been designed for a specific task.
...an ASIC Miner for Bitcoin only calculates hashes for the block chain of Bitcoin. Since these devices provide much more power than a normal computer, only such specialized hardware is used for mining.
For the most part, only large mining farms with hundreds or even thousands of ASIC miners at a time are used for mining. These are often located in China or sustainable countries like Iceland, because of the electricity prices, as the electricity prices are very cheap there.
In European countries, however, electricity costs are usually very high. A mining farm would therefore be difficult to make a profit in Germany. Even normal mining from the PC at home is only worthwhile for very specific crypto currencies, as there are no worthwhile ASIC miners for some crypto currencies.
