Cewe

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CEWE Stiftung & Co. KGaA

logo
legal form Foundation & Co. KGaA
ISIN DE0005403901
founding 1961
Seat Oldenburg , GermanyGermanyGermany 
management
Number of employees 4,199
sales 653.3 million euros
Branch Photo technology , printing
Website www.cewe.de
As of December 31, 2018

Cewe , embodied by the Cewe Foundation & Co. KGaA (spelling: CEWE ) based in Oldenburg , is Europe's largest photo service provider with 14 production locations. Via the brands cewe-print.de, Saxoprint, Laserline and viaprinto, Cewe also offers business stationery such as: B. flyers, posters, brochures and business cards. The company is also active in photo retail with the retail chains Fotojoker (Poland), Japan Photo (Scandinavia), Fotolab (Czech Republic and Slovakia) and Wöltje (Germany).

history

On May 1, 1912, August Friedrich Carl Wöltje founded a "Photographic Institution" in Oldenburg, Lower Saxony. From 1924 he expanded his business to include the sale of cameras and accessories. Shortly after the currency reform in 1948 , his son-in-law Heinz Neumüller joined the company.

In 1950, Carl Wöltje opened one of the first color laboratories in Germany and, with 17 employees, supplied several 100 photo shops with regular customers. Cewe was founded under the name Cewe Color in 1961 by Heinz Neumüller in Oldenburg. The current name came about by including the initials of his father-in-law Carl Wöltje in the company in his honor .

In order to meet the increasing demand for color photos, Cewe built a large photo laboratory in 1964 on a 50,000 m 2 site in Oldenburg- Kreyenbrück . In 1971 the company first went abroad and opened up the Dutch market. 1973 Cewe merged with the United Color in Hamburg and Bremen. From then on, the company name was Vereinigte Cewe Color Betriebe. In the course of the following years, Cewe took over other laboratories at home and abroad and became the market leader for photo development in Germany in the course of the transition from black and white to color photography in the 1970s .

From 1980 photo retail stores were opened in numerous hypermarkets and city centers. These traded under the names Ivema or Fotopoint. It was also now possible to have photos printed on gift items such as mugs or T-shirts.
From 1986 onwards, the company opened further operations in Mönchengladbach, Paris, Berlin, Worms and Dresden. In 1989, Cewe introduced the Eurocombi bag for storing photo orders. In 1992 the group of companies was restructured under the umbrella of Cewe Color Holding AG and in 1993 it was floated on the stock exchange by Hubert Rothärmel. Then Cewe expanded in France, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. The company's shares have been listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange since 1993 .
As early as 1994, Cewe prepared for the change from analog to digital photography and invested in a printer that could print digital photos on photo paper. In addition, the Cewe Photoindex had been introduced shortly before, a card with miniature photos , which was delivered to the customer together with the finished photos and negatives after a film had been exposed . This made it easier to reorder the pictures. The Cewe Photoindex was the first digital mass product ever and is today considered the cornerstone for the digitization of the company and the industry in general. From 1995 pictures of negatives could be scanned, digitized and put out as a picture show on a floppy disk. In 1997 the project became the Cewe Image CD . This could be played on DVD players and, in addition to the customer's photos, also contained software for image processing and presentation. In the same year, Cewe set up the first station for accepting digital image data in a specialist photo shop. In addition, it was now possible to order digital photos via the Internet.

In 2001, Cewe introduced a photo terminal that could accept digital photos and issue them on CD directly at the point of sale .

The company was listed on the SDAX until June 15, 2007, and on March 4, 2009, it was again listed on the SDAX. In addition, Cewe is listed in the Lower Saxony share index Nisax20 .
In 2007, there was a conflict between Cewe management and the shareholder M2 Capital Management AG , a Swiss private equity company. M2 Capital demanded a drastic increase in the dividend , which, in the opinion of the Cewe management board and some major shareholders, would have jeopardized the restructuring and long-term orientation of the company. The investment funds involved in M2 Capital accused the Cewe executive and supervisory board of failure and called for the management to resign. The attack was unsuccessful. Sebastian Freitag, who as owner of the investment bank Freitag & Co. advised the two hedge funds M2 Capital and K Capital and who represented their interests on the Cewe supervisory board, resigned on February 8, 2007. An unchanged dividend of 1.20 euros was distributed for the 2007 financial year. Six years after the conflict, Cewe changed the company form from a stock corporation (Cewe Color Holding AG) to a Foundation & Co. KGaA and thus curtailed the influence of the shareholders.

In 2007, the number of developed digital images (1,515 million) exceeded the number of photos developed from films (1,277 million) for the first time. In the following year, Cewe took over diron from Münster, a provider of software and consulting services for all aspects of commercial printing. At the beginning of 2010 diron started with the pilot aprinto.de , which later became the company viaprinto , an online printing company for companies.

2010 Cewe was by the magazine Wirtschaftswoche and management consultancy A. T. Kearney named "Best Innovator" for the successful transformation into a digital company.

In January 2012, Cewe took over Saxoprint GmbH from Dresden (370 employees, sales 2011: 31.4 million euros). The company thus entered the market for online printing and the business customer market with print runs of up to 200,000 copies.

owner

In addition to the community of heirs of the company founder, who has been the largest shareholder with 27.4% of the share capital since 2007 through the realization of subscription rights , Schroders plc, London, 3.00%, Fidelity Investments 2.98% and Sparinvest Holdings SE, Luxembourg, 2 , 74% of the shares. 2.5% of the company's own shares are held. The rest is widely spread.

production

Cewe generates its main revenue with the production of digital images, photo books , personalized gifts, analog film development and online print jobs.

At the end of the year, the company had 14 photo development companies in Europe and employed around 4,200 people.

Cewe does the photo work for many large retail chains and drugstores. Through cooperation with around 20,000 trading partners in 26 European countries, customers are supplied with photo work on a daily basis, both via points of sale and instant photo stations as well as via mail.

The company's turnover in 2018 was EUR 653.3 million. 2.2 billion photos were developed. The production of photo books reached 6.18 million pieces.

Production sites

In addition to the company headquarters in Oldenburg, Cewe has production sites in Germany in Mönchengladbach , Eschbach near Freiburg, Germering near Munich, Dresden , Berlin and Münster . In other European countries, Cewe has locations in the Czech Republic ( Prague ), France ( Rennes , Montpellier ), Poland ( Kosel in Upper Silesia ), Hungary ( Budapest ) and the United Kingdom ( Warwick ).

literature

  • Johannes Blome-Drees and Reiner Rang: The activities of financial investors in Germany using the example of Cewe Color AG , documentation based on guideline-based interviews with employee representatives of Cewe Color at the end of 2007 on behalf of the Hans Böckler Foundation , Düsseldorf 2009 ( digitized as PDF )

Web links

Commons : Cewe  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Annual Report 2018. In: CEWE Stiftung & Co. KGaA. Retrieved May 12, 2019 .
  2. ^ Johannes Blome-Drees and Reiner Rang: The activities of financial investors in Germany using the example of Cewe Color AG. In: Hans Böckler Foundation. June 2009, accessed March 3, 2017 .
  3. ↑ Klaus-Peter Jordan: Cewe creates a turning point. In: New Osnabrück Newspaper. August 23, 2016, accessed March 3, 2017 .
  4. ↑ Hella Meyer: Image CD - The digital solution for every analog photographer. In: press portal. September 5, 2003, accessed March 3, 2017 .
  5. ↑ FOTO HITS editorial team: 25 years of digital images - CEWE celebrates digital innovations. In: PHOTO HITS. August 3, 2016, accessed March 6, 2017 .
  6. ↑ Herbert Kaspar: CEWE set up digitally for 25 years. In: d-pixx. August 2016, accessed March 6, 2017 .
  7. ↑ Hella Meyer: CeWe Color: The use of digital cameras is increasing rapidly - but how do you get printed pictures quickly and inexpensively? In: press portal. December 6, 2001, accessed March 6, 2017 .
  8. ↑ Ftd: Extraordinary index change ( memento from July 31, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
  9. ↑ Press review on the Cewe Color homepage
  10. ↑ Süddeutsche Zeitung of January 31, 2007 Hedge funds blackmail CeWe Color
  11. ↑ Community of heirs Neumüller supports the board .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , February 5, 2007.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.faz.net  
  12. ↑ Statement from M2 Capital ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Fix CeWe Color Shareholder Site ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / de.biz.yahoo.com @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.fixcewecolor.com
  13. ↑ n-tv, based on a press release from Cewe Color , February 8, 2007.
  14. ↑ Annual Report 2008 of Cewe Color AG, accessed on May 17, 2014.
  15. ↑ CEWE: Shareholders decide to change the legal form , press release at www.dgap.de, June 5, 2013, accessed on May 17, 2014.
  16. ↑ Cewe Color subsidiary offers document printing without a minimum print run. In: international + photo contact. November 24, 2010, accessed March 6, 2017 .
  17. ^ Hans-Jürgen Klesse: "Best Innovator" competition - The most innovative companies of the year. In: Economic Week. February 4, 2010, accessed March 6, 2017 .
  18. ↑ Heiko Weckbrodt: CeWe Color takes over online printing company Saxoprint . Retrieved February 10, 2012.
  19. ↑ Shareholder structure. Retrieved May 17, 2015 .

Coordinates: 53 ° 6 ′ 3.5 ″  N , 8 ° 12 ′ 43.7 ″  E