Koch, Neff and Volckmar

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KNV Zeitfracht GmbH
legal form GmbH
founding 1829 as F. Volckmar
Seat Erfurt
management Thomas Raff
Number of employees circa 1600
sales 546.5 million euros
Branch Intermediate book trade ( bar assortment )
Website www.knv-zeitfracht.de
Status: 2019

The KNV building in Stuttgart-Vaihingen

The KNV Zeitfracht GmbH ( KNV ) is the largest book wholesaler with the function of Barsortiments in Germany. The company, based in Erfurt , with a branch in Stuttgart and external offices in Berlin and Hamburg , supplies booksellers in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and South Tyrol nationwide and mostly overnight with books, new media, games and other articles relevant to the book trade. The company also develops IT solutions for the book trade. In 2016 the group turnover was 546.5 million euros.

The sister company KNO Verlagsausgabe (KNO VA) and its subsidiary, Leipziger Kommissions- und Großbuchhandel (LKG), are active in the field of publisher delivery.

history

Foundation and expansion

In 1829 Friedrich Volckmar founded the company F. Volckmar as a commission business for assortment providers and publishers in Leipzig. The Volckmar'sche commission business consisted of the assortment commission agent (service provider for booksellers), the publisher commission agent (the later publisher delivery) and the order forwarding (the later ordering agency). In 1849 Carl Voerster (1826–1899), Friedrich Volckmar's son-in-law, founded the bar range in Leipzig.

The acquisition of the Stuttgart bar ranges Albert Koch & Co. (1903) and A. Oetinger (1907) required a new building for Koch & Oetinger in Stuttgart: Alfred Voerster, Carl Voerster's only son, and his cousin Hans Volckmar, grandson of the company founder, built it in 1907 / 08 in Stuttgart the so-called Graf-Eberhard-Bau. The architect for this was Karl Hengerer . At the same time, Karl Franz Koehler acquired Paul Neff's commission business in 1907 and from then on operated under Neff & Koehler. In 1917 these two companies merged to form Koch, Neff & Oetinger (KNO). In 1918 the wholesalers KF Koehler and F. Volckmar merged to form Koehler & Volckmar AG (KV) based in Leipzig.

Karl Voerster, a great-grandson of the company founder, started delivering overnight deliveries to booksellers and the book truck service from Leipzig in 1928 . He had enforced with the Reichsbahn that book trolleys could be attached to the express trains to eight major cities.

Nazi era

At the time of National Socialism , efforts were made to withdraw its independence from the company and to incorporate it into the Nazi publishing house Franz Eher Successor . Above all Wilhelm Baur and Max Amann advocated this. In 1936 Theodor Volckmar-Frentzel was temporarily excluded from the Reichsschrifttumskammer, from 1937 a chamber representative was quartered in Leipzig for several months to monitor the publishing house. The fact that the company was able to maintain its independence is mainly due to the fact that Joseph Goebbels did not want Amann's office in Leipzig to be strengthened as a result of taking over the company, and so his subordinates Karl Heinz Hederich and Hans Schmidt-Leonhardt voted against the taking over plans.

In the Second World War , the company buildings in Leipzig were largely destroyed, and reconstruction under the new balance of power did not offer any meaningful prospects there. Although Karl Voerster had the Koehler building in Leipzig repaired, the owner family fled from Leipzig to Stuttgart in 1948 because of the political situation, where the Graf Eberhard building was one of only six buildings in downtown Stuttgart due to its reinforced concrete construction. which had survived the war largely usable. (Other reinforced concrete structures that were still standing were, for example, the Tagblatt Tower , which still exists today, and the famous Schocken department store , built by Erich Mendelsohn and demolished in 1960 ). As expected, the Leipzig company was expropriated in 1949. In the same year, KNO, which was able to start a new beginning in the Graf-Eberhard-Bau in Stuttgart, published the first post-war bar range catalog. The book wholesale trade was rebuilt in Cologne in 1955 under the name Koehler & Volckmar (KV).

Fusion Koch, Neff & Oetinger (KNO)

In 1987 KV took over the Wegner wholesaler in Hamburg. In 2004 the companies Koch, Neff & Oetinger (KNO) and Koehler & Volckmar (KV) merged to form Koch, Neff & Volckmar (KNV). In January 2006 KNV took over the stationery wholesaler Schreyer in Metzingen , which was sold to PBS Germany again in 2008 .

Relocation to Erfurt

On May 20, 2011, the company management announced that the logistic areas of Koch, Neff & Volckmar GmbH at the locations in Stuttgart and Cologne, as well as the logistics of the sister company Koch, Neff & Oetinger GmbH in Stuttgart to be dissolved by 2015 and centralized in the middle of Germany. The official laying of the foundation stone took place on April 10, 2013 in Kühnhäuser Strasse in Erfurt.

Commissioning took place on October 1, 2014 - now under the name KNV-Logistik - with around 420 employees so far. Serious technical problems led to considerable delivery problems, especially when merging so-called included goods from the publisher's own delivery. This triggered a lot of criticism in the book trade because of the upcoming Christmas business and forced KNV to make considerable additional effort, e.g. B. for the use of additional delivery vehicles. Beyond the Christmas business for 2015, customers in southern Germany in particular had to be supplied from Stuttgart until February 2016. The last logistical activities in Stuttgart were then discontinued in spring 2016.

In contrast to the buildings of the sister company KNO VA, which have since been completely demolished, the previous KNV company buildings have so far been empty. All of the non-logistical areas of the two companies remaining in Stuttgart have meanwhile moved together into a new building complex created by an investor, at the front of which the company is now named "KNV Group".

The sixth generation of the family company's managing partners were most recently Oliver Voerster and, until March 31, 2017, Frank Thurmann. Since July 1, 2012, Uwe Ratajczak has also been managing director for more than five years.

Bankruptcy in February 2019

The managing directors of the KNV group of companies filed for insolvency at the Stuttgart District Court on February 14, 2019 after negotiations with an investor had failed the previous evening. Business operations will continue for the time being. The LKG (Leipziger Kommissions- und Großbuchhandelsgesellschaft mbH), which also belongs to the KNV Group, is not affected.

Linked to the bankruptcy are the financial losses of around 5,000 publishers who sell books through KNV. The proceeds for books delivered at the time of bankruptcy, which KNV charged the bookstores but had not yet transferred to the publishers, are part of the bankruptcy estate and are therefore largely lost to the publishers. Because of the long payment terms of 60 - 90 days, which are customary in the industry , and because the high-turnover Christmas business is affected, the losses are sometimes considerable and in individual cases even threaten the existence of the company. The books that were still stored at KNV at the time of the insolvency are not part of the bankruptcy estate.

In June 2019, the insolvency administrator announced that the company should be taken over by the logistics company Zeitfracht and continued with all locations and employees. The change of ownership took place on August 1, 2019. The previous, sixth generation managing partner Oliver Voerster (as direct descendant of the founding family Volckmar) and Bertram Feuerbacher have left the company in this context.

Fields of activity

Bar range

The core business is the function of the bar range with around 480,000 different items and a storage area of ​​60,000 m² at the Stuttgart and Erfurt locations. Since 2006, bookstore departments have been able to fully equip departments via so-called system services (also known as “ Vendor Managed Inventory ”, or VMI for short).

Goods ordered electronically are usually delivered to booksellers in the night-jump procedure on the next day before 10 a.m. The delivery takes place with the book trolley service via company-owned trucks and semi-trailers to over 7,000 book sales outlets in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and South Tyrol. Central warehouses have been maintained for suppliers who supply consumers directly, for example the central warehouse of the online bookseller Buecher.de, since 1999 .

Information technology

The company develops software specifically for the book industry and trains booksellers in how to use this software. The standard programs are called pcbis.de, fitbis.de and euro-BIS. These are bibliography , ordering and inventory management systems . For corporate customers of booksellers, the software POEM has been available since 2003, which takes over the electronic management of subscriptions and orders.

KNV Zeitfracht is a founding member of EDitEUR, an international organization in London that strives for standardization in the book trade. With the KNV Clearing Center, KNV Zeitfracht acts as a neutral intermediary for electronic data exchange between bookstores and publishers. The data of orders, order confirmations, invoices and delivery notes are converted from and to standard EDI formats ( EANCOM ).

E-commerce

KNV Zeitfracht provides booksellers with the www.buchkatalog.de platform, which can be integrated into their homepage as a web shop . In addition to the database of all items in stock in the bar range, booksellers have access to 50,000 specialist and general- interest magazines , around 100 million antiquarian or used books from Germany and abroad and around 155,000 e-books from the download shop www.e-buchkatalog.de. End customers ( B2C ) can order all items in the bar range via this internet platform . The ordered goods are either delivered to a local bookstore or to the end customer's home.

public relation

In the company's former warehouse in Cologne - always with a name - Denis Scheck commented on the top ten titles on the current Spiegel bestseller lists as part of the ARD literary program Hot off the press .

Competitor

literature

  • Thomas Bez: intermediate book trade. In: The Stuttgart book trade in the 20th century. Hoffmann, Stuttgart 1997, pp. 91-114, ISBN 3-932001-00-1 .
  • Jürgen Voerster: History of the companies Koehler & Volckmar, Koch Neff & Volckmar, Koch Neff & Oetinger-Verlagsausgabe and the founding company F. Volckmar from 1829 to 2009. Stuttgart: Koch, Neff & Volckmar 2009, ISBN 978-3-87423-001- 8 .
  • Thomas Keiderling: Entrepreneur under National Socialism. Power struggle for the Koehler & Volckmar AG & Co. group. 2nd improved edition. Sax-Verlag, Beucha 2008, ISBN 978-3-934544-39-0 .
  • Thomas Keiderling: Friedrich Volckmar (1799–1876). In: Gerald Wiemers (Ed.): Sächsische Lebensbilder. Volume 5, Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2003, pp. 539-560.
  • Peter von Meyer-Dohm and Wolfgang Strauss (eds.): Handbook of the book trade in four volumes. Volume 4. Verlag für Buchmarkt -forschung , Hamburg 1977, ISBN 3-578-00933-4 .
  • Jo Volks: Focus on the bar range. In: Buchmarkt , May 2004, pp. 22–25, PDF 68 kB .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Peggy Voigt: The new market power of the secret giants. In: Buchreport Magazin , January 2005, pp. 10–20.
  2. ↑ Investor negotiations failed: KNV Group reports insolvency Report in the online edition of Börsenblatt - weekly magazine for the German book trade dated February 14, 2018, accessed on February 14, 2018
  3. ↑ Voerster 2009, pp. 100-106.
  4. ↑ DNV-ONLINE, Hamburg Germany: KNV wants to bundle its logistics at a new location. Retrieved February 25, 2019 .
  5. ↑ Now official: KN Logistik goes to Erfurt , Boersenblatt.net, accessed on September 3, 2012.
  6. ↑ Laying of the foundation stone for a new logistics center for books in Erfurt. Retrieved February 25, 2019 .
  7. ↑ Book wholesaler lays foundation stone for logistics center in Erfurt. Retrieved February 25, 2019 .
  8. ↑ Diary on logistics problems at KNV / The move or: Actually, we just want to sell books. Retrieved February 25, 2019 .
  9. ↑ Management of the KNV Group / Frank Thurmann resigns. Retrieved February 25, 2019 .
  10. ↑ Corporate group KNV and KNO VA: Management expanded to a trio , Boersenblatt.net, accessed on November 5, 2012.
  11. ↑ knv.de - press release on filing for insolvency accessed on February 14, 2019
  12. ↑ Börsenblatt: KNV Group files for bankruptcy, accessed on February 16, 2019
  13. ^ Daniel Gräfe: Small publishers suffer from KNV insolvency . In: Stuttgarter Zeitung . June 22, 2019, p. 14 .
  14. ↑ Deutschlandfunk: Book wholesaler KNV is sold to logistics company , June 26, 2019
  15. ↑ https://www.boersenblatt.net/2019-07-25-artikel-kartellamt_und_banken_iegen_gruenes_licht.1697448.html
  16. ↑ a b KNV: Facts & Figures. Retrieved February 25, 2019 .
  17. ↑ Zwischenbuchhandel / KNV and book partners work together in the food retail sector. Retrieved February 25, 2019 .
  18. ↑ KNO-Logistik.de (PDF; 2.0 MB) Press report: An indispensable partner
  19. ↑ KNV: Industry software. Retrieved February 25, 2019 .
  20. ↑ BuchMarkt Verlag K. Werner GmbH: New e-procurement solution "Poem" from KNV and LeserAuskunft supports customer management in the book trade. In: BuchMarkt. July 6, 2004, accessed on February 25, 2019 (German).
  21. ↑ EDITEUR. Retrieved February 25, 2019 .
  22. ↑ KNV: This is how the KNV Clearing Center works. Retrieved February 25, 2019 .
  23. ↑ Coupling instead of hanging out . In: Buchreport .Express No. 9, March 4, 2010
  24. ↑ "Book included - free shipping" . In: Buchreport .Express No. 14, April 8, 2010