Karl-Heinz Sonne

Karl-Heinz sun (* 3. June 1915 in Bochum ; † 2. November 1997 in Tegernsee ) was a German manager , who from 1944 to 1965 for the Quandt family controlled companies, particularly from 1962 to 1965 at BMW , acted and then until 1975 chairman of the board of Klöckner-Humboldt-Deutz AG .

Life

The son of the managing director of a Bochum tram company studied in Berlin, became a business graduate and received his doctorate.

Act

Sun then went to the Berlin electrical company Gesfürel Group , in which he was soon employed as a management assistant. This was followed by a year at the Norddeutsche Kabelwerke in Berlin-Neukölln and three months at the Isar-Amper-Werke in Munich. From May 1940 to December 1943 he was conscripted for military service. He then worked for a war trust company in Berlin for a year. During the war he served for almost three years in the Wehrmacht High Command as a price inspector. In 1944, Sonne, who for health reasons had not been admitted to the pilot's fitness test, was released for the Quandt group, in which his actual managerial career began.

In the Quandt Group, from March 1944 to October 1944, Sonne was the commercial manager of a battery factory in Vienna before he moved to Concordia Elektrizitäts-AG (CEAG) in Dortmund. After a few years he was on the board and in 1956 became chairman of the board of this largest filter and dust separator factory on the continent.

New class: BMW 1500

In 1962, major shareholder Herbert Quandt sent him as the new CEO of BMW AG in Munich, although he had no experience in the automotive industry. Under his aegis, the “New Class” BMW 1500, which was presented in 1961, went into production in August 1962. The New Class was a great success , especially with the BMW 1800 , BMW 2000 and BMW 1600-2 versions . Sonne prepared the sale of the aircraft engine production and the Allach plant to MTU . In the three years until his amicable departure in 1965, sales rose from around 245 to 514 million marks and the company last had 10,000 employees. Gerhard Wilcke was appointed as his successor.

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In 1965 he was hired by major shareholder Günther Henle to succeed Heinrich Jakopp, who had been in office for many years, as head of Klöckner-Humboldt-Deutz AG (KHD) in Cologne with around 34,000 employees. Within two years, Sonne succeeded in bringing the recently losing company back into profitability. During his time there, KHD concentrated on the truck and bus business of the Magirus-Deutz brand , which contributed around 40 percent to group sales in the early 1970s and was by far KHD's most important business area. At the beginning of the 1970s, however, the general business environment for commercial vehicles deteriorated, for which, among other things, exchange rates and overcapacity were blamed. 1971 was a lean year for almost all German truck manufacturers: there was a production decline of just over eight percent on average and of over 26 percent at Magirus-Deutz. In 1972 things continued to decline. Nevertheless, KHD optimistically inaugurated a new assembly plant near Ulm . Approx. In 1971 the market share for commercial vehicles in Germany was approx. 13.5%, which put the company in third place behind Daimler-Benz and MAN-Büssing . The tractors, agricultural machinery and construction machinery sector also suffered, although it held less than 20 percent of KHD's total sales. One of Sonne's last major actions in 1975 was the transfer of truck production to Iveco , a joint venture with Fiat , for which there was a 20% stake in the new entity. In July 1975, Sonne handed over the chairmanship of the board to Bodo Liebe, under whom the company was to give itself up completely to infirmity.

Web links

• Dr.oec. Karl-Heinz Sonne. In: BMW history. BMW AG, accessed on March 24, 2020 (CV in the BMW Group Archive). 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Karl-Heinz Sonne in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)
2. ↑ BMW: "Cold Duck" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 36 , 1962, pp. 30-33 ( online ).
3. ^ BMW: "Bavaria's Gloria" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 8 , 1965, p. 62-66 ( online ).
4. ↑ Jochen Wilke: DasPorträt: Karl-Heinz Sun: return to the area . In: The time . February 12, 1965, ISSN  0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed March 25, 2020]).
5. ↑ Florian Triebel: Dr. Karl-Heinz Sonne. (PDF) The organizer of the climb. In: Mobile Tradition live. BMW AG, 2006, pp. 56–59 , accessed on March 24, 2020 (document in the BMW Group Archive).