Leibbrand group

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REWE Handelsgesellschaft Leibbrand oHG
legal form oHG
founding 1961
resolution 1989
Reason for dissolution Sale to Rewe
Seat bad Homburg
management Willi Leibbrand
sales 13 billion DM (1986)
Branch Grocery retail

The Leibbrand Group was a trading company based in Bad Homburg . It was founded by Willi Leibbrand in 1961 and fully integrated into the Rewe Group in 1989 . The grocery discounter Penny and the toom hardware store come from here .

history

The group's history goes back to 1961. Hugo Leibbrand owned a wholesaler in the small town of Rosbach vor der Höhe in Hesse that mainly supplied small corner shops . His son Willi Leibbrand, however, had other plans, he wanted to expand. In 1965 he opened in Frankfurt its first self-service store with the name HL-market , after the initials of his father H ugo L eibbrand. Willi had already opened his 70th branch in 1970 and generated sales of over DM 140 million  .

His goal was to be cheaper than the competition despite the price control that still prevailed . The motto was big sales and little benefit. When fixed prices were abolished in the early 1970s, Willi Leibbrand was able to undercut the prices of the competition with the strategy of foregoing large unit profits. At the same time, when the discounters emerged on the green field , Willi Leibbrand founded the Penny discount store, the miniMAL supermarket and the toom hypermarket .

Partnership with REWE

However, the constant expansion costs a lot of money. So Leibbrand started looking for a business partner. In 1972 the REWE cooperative took over 50 percent of his company. In 1976 the motto was to open a new store every other day. A short time later, Klaus Wiegandt was brought into the house. With him it was possible within a few years to increase the group's turnover to over DM 10 billion.

In 1977, the first competitors were bought up, including the Latscha grocery chain in Frankfurt and the Hartfil discount stores in Lower Saxony. In 1984 the company already had 2,300 branches and a turnover of almost DM 12 billion. In 1988, the oHG made the largest purchase when it acquired the German supermarket trading company based in Düsseldorf . The company included the German supermarket , DeSuMa , Otto Mess and Hill chains . The number of branches rose again rapidly. The newly acquired stores were often not integrated into the Leibbrand Group's network. At the end of 1988, a total of eight supermarket chains belonged to the Leibbrand Group.

  • Logo German supermarket after the takeover

  • Logo Otto-Mess-Markt

  • Logo Hill supermarket

takeover

Uniform REWE logo from 2006

In previous years, the REWE Group had made additional investments in trading companies, including the supermarket chains Stüssgen and PETZ. So it came about that in 1989 REWE Handelsgesellschaft Leibbrand oHG was completely taken over and integrated by the REWE Group. The German supermarket, DeSuMa and Hill chains were then changed to Rewe supermarkets, HL markets or miniMal markets. With this, the REWE Group rose to first place in the grocery trade ranking in Germany in 1990, with a network of over 9,000 branches and a turnover of 24.6 billion DM.

In 2006 the Rewe Group announced a complete restructuring of the group and the sales lines. Since then, all supermarkets have been operating uniformly as REWE stores, with the discounter Penny and the toom hardware stores remaining unaffected.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Purely private: The Hessian supermarket chain Leibbrand has managed to become the second largest food retailer in Germany in a good two decades . In: Der Spiegel . No. 48 , 1986, pp. 63-67 ( online ).
  2. ↑ Company history REWE Group
  3. ↑ Bert Warich: restructuring in the food retail sector . In: Hans Böckler Foundation . June 2011 ( DOCPLAYER ).