Heinz Hermann Thiele

Heinz Hermann Thiele (collage by Danor Shtruzman)

Heinz Hermann Thiele (born April 2, 1941 in Mainz ) is a German entrepreneur, the main shareholder of Vossloh AG and Knorr-Bremse AG (one of the world's leading manufacturers of braking systems for rail and commercial vehicles) and the largest single shareholder of Lufthansa .

Career

Thiele studied law and began his career at Knorr-Bremse in 1969 as a legal clerk in the patent department. From 1972 he headed the legal department. In 1975 he became head of sales for the commercial vehicle department and in 1977 took over the commercial vehicle brakes division. In 1979 he became Managing Director of Sales at what was then Knorr-Bremse GmbH. In September 1985 he became a member of the Executive Board. The company got into trouble due to conflicts between the two shareholders Jens-Diether von Bandemer and his uncle Johannes Vielmetter. In 1986, Bandemer surprisingly sold his 71% stake in Thiele, who became CEO in 1987.

In 1989 Heinz Thiele became the sole owner when the company heirs wanted to sell, whereby he financed the takeover through credit. He converted Knorr into a stock corporation, sold the pneumatics business and concentrated on air brakes . At the beginning of the 1990s Knorr-Bremse took a stake in Bendix Corporation , and in 2002 the remaining 65% was taken over by Honeywell . In May 2006 he announced that he would be joining the Supervisory Board on April 1, 2007.

Thiele has bundled his activities in Stella Vermögensverwaltungs GmbH, based in Grünwald , of which he is himself the managing director. This company holds 80.7% of the shares in KB Holding GmbH, which in turn holds 95% of the shares in Knorr-Bremse AG and around 50.09% in Vossloh AG.

During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Thiele invested heavily in the ailing airline Lufthansa: In the course of March, he increased his share from 5% to initially over 10%; Thiele has held 15.52% of the voting rights since June 15, 2020. This makes him the largest single shareholder in Lufthansa.

His management style is considered authoritarian in the style of a classic patriarch, who is also not afraid of conflict with trade unions and who did not conclude a collective agreement in his group until 2020 .

capital

Bloomberg Billionaires ranked him 94th richest person in the world with assets of $ 11.8 billion (as of February 20, 2015). According to List 2015 of Forbes magazine his fortune amounted to about 6.4 billion US dollars. With this, Thiele was ranked 220 on the Forbes list of the richest people in the world. As of May 2020, Bloomberg now ranks him 74th with $ 15.5 billion.

Awards

• 2006: Ring of Honor of the Passau district
• 2007: Bavarian Order of Merit
• 2011: Beuth Medal of Honor from the German Machine Technology Society V. (DMG)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Frank-Thomas Wenzel, Week of Decision: Lufthansa flying blind, Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung, June 23, 2020, p. 11
2. ↑ Niefer leaves the Supervisory Board . In: Der Spiegel . No. 46 , 1984 ( online ).
3. ↑ Knorr-Bremse: The climber follows the dropout. In: The time . December 27, 1985, accessed October 31, 2016 . 
4. ↑ ^{a b} Michael Freitag, Ursula Schwarzer: "Beware of the platform edge" . In: manager magazin . July 28, 2015 ( manager-magazin.de ).
5. ↑ Knorr-Bremse Honeywell subsidiary taken over , January 24, 2002
6. ↑ See Federal Gazette
7. ↑ Vossloh AG half-year balance sheet on July 25, 2019
8. ↑ Munich billionaire: Investor Thiele joins Lufthansa - is he also striving for power there? .
9. ↑ Lufthansa major shareholder Thiele increases to 15 percent, June 16, 2020 - comdirect Informer .
10. ↑ Lufthansa Group Investor Relations: Shareholder structure. Retrieved April 27, 2020 . 
11. ↑ Bloomberg Billionaires: Today's ranking of the world's richest people , February 20, 2015 (accessed February 20, 2015)
12. ^ Heinz Hermann Thiele & family . In: Forbes . ( forbes.com [accessed February 17, 2018]).
13. ↑ # 74 Heinz Hermann Thiele bloomberg.com, accessed on May 21, 2020
14. ^ Rolf Schraut: Awarding the Beuth Medal of Honor 2011. Accessed on April 27, 2020 .