Germany AG

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

With Germany AG , a network of links between big was up to the recent past, banks , insurance companies and industrial enterprises designated. This network was based on mutual equity investments and a concentration of supervisory board mandates from leading German managers , trade unionists and politicians. The term Deutschland AG was mostly associated with a negative evaluation of the network, assuming that the interrelationships produced coordinated behavior at the expense of third parties, hindered competition and enabled a coordinated influence on economic policy decisions . On the other hand, under the heading of Rhenish capitalism, it was discussed whether a coordinated economy offers advantages over an overly liberalized economic order.

The term originally goes back to Andrew Shonfield , who described Germany in 1965 as an "organized private enterprise". Shonfield has thus described that Germany functions as an organization that "limits competition internally and strives for unity from the outside."

In the second half of the 20th century, the major German financial institutions, in particular Deutsche Bank and Allianz , with their large industrial holdings, were regarded as the center of Deutschland AG . GHH , MAN , Veba , Thyssen AG, Krupp AG (before the merger to Thyssenkrupp in the 1990s), Volkswagen , Preussag , BASF , Hoesch , Ruhrgas AG or Mannesmann embodied the industrial core of Deutschland AG together with many important stock corporations. Alfred Herrhausen was one of the last outstanding representatives , together with Edzard Reuter , Rudolf von Bennigsen-Foerder , Manfred Lennings and Klaus Liesen . An example of the end of Deutschland AG was the hostile takeover of Mannesmann by Vodafone in February 2000.

With the limitation of the number of supervisory board mandates and the increasing internationalization of the capital markets as well as a reduction in longer-term equity investments in favor of new investment strategies in investment banking from the 1990s, there is talk of an end to Deutschland AG, but at least a decrease in the power of German industrial managers in interaction with the big German ones Financial institutions noted. For example, Section 100 of the Stock Corporation Act stipulates that a person may be a member of the supervisory board of a maximum of ten companies and the chairman of the supervisory board of a maximum of five companies. The German Corporate Governance Code (which is not mandatory in contrast to the law) generally recommends concentrating a maximum of five supervisory board mandates in one person.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Wolfgang Streeck and Martin Höpner (2003): Alle Macht dem Markt ?: Case studies on the liquidation of Germany AG. Campus-Verlag , p. 16. ISBN 978-3593372655
  2. 15 years of the Mannesmann takeover - How the “shark” defeated the “brain” - article in Handelsblatt, February 4, 2015
  3. Torsten Oltmanns , Christiane Diekmann, Vera Böhm: Elite Marketing: How to Reach Decision-Makers. Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2008, pp. 26-27