Ask most visitors to name a German company and you get a car badge. Maybe two.
Fair enough. But the second-largest company in this country by revenue sells groceries. It sits in a small town on the Neckar, and you cannot buy a single share of it.
That’s the Schwarz Gruppe in Neckarsulm, which owns Lidl and Kaufland. It’s the largest retailer in Europe. It has no shareholders outside one family.
That isn’t an exception here. It’s closer to the rule.
The Ones You Can Buy
Germany’s stock index is the DAX, and it holds forty companies. It held thirty from 1988 until September 2021, so an older article will tell you something different.
The names in it are the ones you would guess. Volkswagen and BMW, Siemens and SAP, BASF and Allianz. Large, serious, and a thoroughly misleading picture of who does business in this country.
The index is a decent thermometer and a bad map. Several of the ten biggest companies in the country by revenue are missing from it, and not because they are small.
The Ones You Cannot
Start with food, because that’s where the money quietly is.
Aldi is two companies, not one. The Albrecht brothers divided the business between them decades ago, and Aldi Nord out of Essen has run separately from Aldi Süd ever since. Both are private. Neither answers to a stock market.
Rewe and Edeka aren’t companies in the ordinary sense either. Both are cooperatives, owned by the independent merchants who run the stores. The Edeka in a German neighborhood usually carries a surname on the sign, and that’s the person who owns it.
Bosch is private too, which surprises people who assume a company that size must be listed somewhere. So is Bertelsmann, the media group in Gütersloh. So is Würth, so is Stihl, so is most of what you’ll meet further down this page.
One word to get right, because you’ll run into it constantly. Mittelstand describes how a firm is owned and run, not how big it is. A family business with tens of thousands of employees on four continents still counts. Translating it as small and medium enterprise sends people looking for a corner shop.
When a Foundation Owns the Factory
Then there’s an arrangement that has no tidy English equivalent. A Stiftung, or foundation, owns the company outright.
Ernst Abbe built the first one in 1889 for Zeiss, the optics firm now headquartered in Oberkochen. The Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung is still the sole shareholder, and it owns the glassmaker Schott as well. The model has outlasted two world wars, a partition, and a reunification.
Bosch does something similar with a twist. A charitable foundation holds around 94 percent of the share capital and collects the dividends. Almost all the voting rights sit elsewhere, in a trust built to keep the company steering itself.
The point of the whole construction is time. A firm with no quarterly earnings call can spend ten years on something and tell nobody. Whether that produces patience or simply a comfortable absence of scrutiny depends entirely on the firm, and it does vary.
The Ones Nobody Has Heard Of
Underneath all of that sits the layer that actually explains the export figures.
Schwanau is a village in Baden. Herrenknecht builds tunnel boring machines there and leads the world at it. The machines that cut the Gotthard Base Tunnel came out of that village, and roughly nine tenths of what the company sells goes abroad.
About 15 km (9 mi) northwest of Stuttgart, in Ditzingen, Trumpf makes industrial lasers. That includes the extreme-ultraviolet lasers inside the machines that print the world’s most advanced computer chips. Zeiss supplies the optics for those same machines.
Two towns most Germans would struggle to find on a map, and a good share of the global chip industry runs through both.
The pattern keeps repeating. Würth in Künzelsau is the biggest distributor of industrial screws on the planet, in the same family since 1945. Stihl in Waiblingen makes the best-selling chainsaw in the world. Kärcher in Winnenden built the pressure washer business, and we turned the brand name into a verb.
Faber-Castell has been making pencils in Stein since 1761. Around two billion a year, with the eighth generation of the family in charge. :-)
None of these firms is trying to be famous. Being the only serious supplier of one specific thing beats being recognized, and they worked that out a long time ago.
It also explains something you’ll notice driving here. A town of six thousand people will have a company car park that looks far too big for it. Next to it stands a plain building with a name on the gate that means nothing to you. That building may well supply half the world with one component.
Why the Ownership Matters to You
This isn’t only a curiosity for investors. It changes what the country feels like.
A firm owned by a family in its home town behaves differently from one owned by a pension fund four time zones away. It sponsors the local pool. It keeps the plant open through a bad year that a listed competitor would have used as a reason to close it. It also, occasionally, resists change long past the point where change was needed.
Both halves of that are true, and you can see the results from the road.
For how the pieces fit together, start with German business. The engineering tradition these firms are built on sits on German engineering.