Karl Hoesch

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Karl Hoesch ( also called Kalla Hoesch in Ruhr German ) is a non-existent entrepreneur. This term is still a fixed expression (not only in the Ruhr area ) and as pars pro toto it stands for everything that has to do with the steel company Hoesch AG .

Guiding principle

In large parts of the manufacturing industry, too, the term “Karl Hoesch” is used synonymously when it comes to buying high-quality steel from German production or, in the narrower sense, from Dortmund production . The latter ended with the last racking at the Phoenix works in Hörde in 1999, but steel is still bought from “Karl Hoesch”. More precisely: You can still buy a limited amount of steel products from Dortmund production, because there are still painted and coated sheets from a rolling mill for final processing on the huge, otherwise largely empty areas of Europe's largest industrial wasteland. The raw material for this, however, comes from the iron and steel works of ThyssenKrupp Steel in Duisburg , where all of the steel company's “liquid phase” activities have been relocated to improve logistics on the Rhine.

The Hoesch AG paced the ThyssenKrupp Corporation; instead of 25,000 employees, only about 1,200 now work on the remaining Westfalenhütte in Dortmund (as of June 2006). Overall, the Dortmund workforce shrank from a level of 52,000 around 1970 to this remainder of 1,200.

There was no person named Karl in the industrial family Hoesch , at least not as an owner-entrepreneur in the Aachen or Dortmund area. In this respect, the personalization "Karl Hoesch" is on the one hand an inside joke or on the other hand an abbreviation for "Stahl von Hoesch". The name is supposed to represent a robust entrepreneur who stands by his word, whose delivery dates fit and are kept, who delivers quality, even if he does not offer the lowest price. There's no trouble with his steel: that's what the steel producer "Karl Hoesch" virtually stands for.

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