Bernhard Rothfos

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Johannes Bernhard Rothfos (born September 4, 1898 in St. Magnus ; † June 21, 1998 in Hamburg ) was a German entrepreneur and businessman .

Live and act

Bernhard Rothfos was a son of Johann Dietrich Rothfos. His father worked as an innkeeper and grocer. Rothfos spent his childhood and youth in his birthplace north of Bremen . Contrary to his original intentions to take up the profession of medicine, in 1914 he started a commercial apprenticeship at the coffee import company Resing & Co. in Bremen. During the First World War , Rothfos did military service. Then he went to Berlin , where he worked for a branch of a coffee importer from Bremen.

On April 10, 1922, he and his friend Hermann Heinrich Ferdinand Gollücke founded the Gollücke und Rothfos trading company . The company based on the Schlachte imported green coffee. Since Hamburg had had a coffee futures exchange since 1887 and was much more important for the coffee trade than Bremen, the entrepreneurs opened an additional purchasing office there on August 17, 1925. After Gollücke left the Hamburg company in 1926, Rothfos left the joint company in Bremen in July 1927. From then on, the entrepreneurs went their separate ways.

Rothfos moved the company headquarters to an office at Sandthorquai No. 20 in Hamburg's Speicherstadt , where numerous other coffee trading companies were also located. Although Rothfos had strong competitors, the company developed well until the beginning of the global economic crisis . Rothfos achieved a market share of five to six percent of German green coffee imports. At that time, the entrepreneur was a member of the board of directors of the association of companies involved in coffee , which he temporarily took over as chairman. During the time of National Socialism , sales fell again. The reasons for this were restrictions in free trade due to foreign exchange procurement and state quota regulations. During the Second World War , the company completely stopped the coffee trade. Rothfo's business premises were destroyed in Operation Gomorrah .

After the end of the war, Rothfos traded carpets, clothing, cosmetics and cars, among other things. He also built up a new business area: he processed and sold medicinal herbs and wild fruits for the pharmaceutical industry, which produced tea from them. This resulted in the working group for the distribution of consumer goods in 1948 . In 2008 the company had around 300 branches. From 1948 Rothfos started trading coffee again. A year later, the company moved to Sandthorquaihof in the Speicherstadt. After the coffee trade was liberalized in 1954, Rothfos expanded. The entrepreneur successfully asserted himself in a strong competitive environment. He not only imported raw materials, but also processed and sold the coffee himself. Rothfos established branches in countries from which he imported coffee, including a company in Costa Rica in 1955. He also set up facilities in which the raw materials could be stored and processed. In addition, he set up sales branches and trading centers in sales countries in Europe and the USA. The companies he founded in 1955 included the Union Kaffee Rösterei and Deutsche Extrakt Kaffee .

Bernhard Rothfos held a managerial position in the company well into old age. In 1980 he took over the chairmanship of the supervisory board of the newly founded partnership limited by shares , which was converted into a stock corporation in 1986. The company developed into a world market leader with a market share of 10 percent in 1988. Rothfos was considered "the most important green coffee trader in the world". In the same year the Neumann Kaffee Gruppe took over the majority of the shares.

family

Bernhard Rothfos married Mika Benecke in 1923, whom he met in Berlin after the First World War. The couple had three sons and a daughter. In 1977, the sons Cuno and Jan Beernd took over some of the processing and sales departments in their father's company. The Mika Rothfos Foundation in Niendorf is named after Rothfos wife . Bernhard Rothfos founded the residential complex for elderly people in need in 1959.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Success makes you sluggish . In: Der Spiegel . No. 10 , 1986 ( online ).
personal data
SURNAME Rothfos, Bernhard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rothfos, Johannes Bernhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German entrepreneur and businessman
DATE OF BIRTH September 4, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Magnus
DATE OF DEATH June 21, 1998
Place of death Hamburg