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Lufthansa
Lufthansa isn’t a century-old airline — it’s a 1953 reboot that inherited a brand, not a balance sheet.
Germany
A nation assembled late, undone twice, and rebuilt on the memory of both.
- 9
- in business
- 10:40
- average
- 96 min
- in total
- 53
- across the network
All briefs
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MAN SE
A 263-year industrial lineage ended not with bankruptcy or scandal—but with a silent statutory merger into Traton SE in August 2021.
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BASF
BASF isn’t a legacy—it’s a rebranding of catastrophe.
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Bayer
Friedrich Bayer · 1863
Bayer was a dyestuffs partnership founded in 1863 by Friedrich Bayer and Johann Friedrich Weskott. It expanded through synthetic dye innovation, relocated due to arsenic contamination, built brand equity via Aspirin and the Bayer Cross, then merged into IG Farben in 1925 — whose assets were seized post-WWII for Nazi atrocities.
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Deutsche Telekom
Europe’s biggest telecom isn’t building the future — it’s renting out the pipes to those who claim they are.
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Rheinmetall
A rejected weapon only succeeded when a rival army proved it worked.
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SAP
Dietmar Hopp · 1972
SAP is the world's largest vendor of enterprise software. Founded in 1972 in Walldorf by Dietmar Hopp and four former IBM colleagues, it built its first product—the RF financial accounting system—in 1973 for Imperial Chemical Industries in Östringen. Its technical distinction was real-time operation via local electronic storage and a common logical database, eliminating overnight punch card processing. It restructured from GbR to GmbH (1981), to AG (late 1980s), to SE (2014). Hopp led SAP from 1988 to 2005 and retained ~10% equity.
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ThyssenKrupp
A merger of two centuries-old steel dynasties that bought scale but not coherence.
Porsche
Ferdinand Porsche · 1931
Porsche began as a contract engineering firm — not a carmaker. Its first product was the Volkswagen Beetle, designed for the German government in 1931. It earned royalties on every Beetle built. Only in 1948 did it sell its first car under its own name: the 356, built by hand in a Gmünd sawmill using Beetle-sourced components due to post-war scarcity. Over 78,000 356s were made across 17 years — but the company’s revenue came first from consulting, then royalties, not car sales.