ThyssenKrupp

ThyssenKrupp AG (, stylized as thyssenkrupp) is a German multinational conglomerate with focus on industrial engineering and steel production. It is the result of the 1999 merger of Thyssen AG and Krupp and has its operational headquarters in Duisburg and Essen. The company claims to be one of the world's largest steel producers; it was ranked tenth-largest worldwide by revenue in 2015. It is divided into 670 subsidiaries worldwide. The largest shareholders are Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation and Cevian Capital. Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach was later convicted of crimes against humanity.
In addition to steel production, ThyssenKrupp's products range from machines and industrial services to high-speed trains, elevators, and shipbuilding. Subsidiary ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems also manufactures frigates, corvettes, and submarines for the German and foreign navies.
In 2018, ThyssenKrupp announced that the company would split into two companies, ThyssenKrupp Industrials, and ThyssenKrupp Materials. The split was supposed to take effect beginning 1 October 2019; however, in May 2019, it was revealed that ThyssenKrupp cancelled its plans to split the company into two.
History.
ThyssenKrupp is the result of a merger of two German steel companies, Thyssen AG founded in 1891 under the name "Gewerkschaft Deutscher Kaiser" and Krupp founded in 1811. As early as the 1980s, the companies began negotiations on a merger and began closely cooperating in some business areas. In 1997, the companies combined their flat steel activities, with a full merger completed in March 1999.
Beginnings (1811–1891).
Krupp
Thyssen
Wilhelminian period (1892–1917).
Krupp
Thyssen
Weimar Republic (1918–1933).
Krupp
Thyssen
Third Reich (1933–1945).
Krupp
Thyssen
Mergers and acquisitions.
During a period of expansion in 1978, Thyssen AG entered the North American automotive industry with the acquisition of Budd's automotive operations, which became the automotive division of Thyssen and operated in North America as Budd Thyssen, later ThyssenKrupp Budd Co. In October 2006, ThyssenKrupp sold ThyssenKrupp Budd's North American body and chassis operations to Martinrea International Inc.
In 1988, ThyssenKrupp acquired German shock absorber manufacturer Bilstein, where it became a division until 2005, where it became a wholly owned subsidiary.
In 1991, ThyssenKrupp acquired German company Hoesch AG.
In 1999, Thyssen (one of the companies of the merger to form Thyssenkrupp Elevator) acquired the elevator division of American-based conglomerate Dover Corporation. Four years later, ThyssenKrupp acquired the Korean-based Dongyang Elevator.
In 2005 ThyssenKrupp acquired Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft (HDW) in Kiel from One Equity Partners. One Equity Partners holds 25% of the TKMS shares.
In December 2005, ThyssenKrupp acquired 60% of Atlas Elektronik from BAE Systems, with EADS acquiring the remaining 40%.
In August 2007, ThyssenKrupp Materials North America acquired OnlineMetals.com, a small-quantity distributor of semi-finished metals and plastics based in Seattle, Washington.
In early 2008, ThyssenKrupp Aerospace acquired Apollo Metals and Aviation Metals, both suppliers to aerospace and defence based in Kent, Washington.
In June 2012, ThyssenKrupp sold Thyssenkrupp Waupaca to KPS Capital Partners. ThyssenKrupp Waupaca is a tier two supplier to the automotive industry, located in Waupaca, Wisconsin.
In April 2014, ThyssenKrupp announced it was in talks to sell its Swedish maritime defence unit to Saab after failing to agree deals with the Swedish government for a new generation of submarines.
ThyssenKrupp Access, the global manufacturer of home elevators, wheelchair lifts, and stairlifts, has tied up with Chennai-based Indian Company Elite Elevators. The company has launched luxury home elevators segments targeting HNI Clientele to launch high-end elevators in India. In June 2018, Thyssenkrupp signed a final agreement with India's Tata Steel to establish a long-expected steel venture. The 50-50 joint venture will be called Thyssenkrupp Tata Steel and will be the second-largest steel producer in Europe, after ArcelorMittal.
Divestments and Restructures of Steel Business.
Steel Europe.
In September 2017, ThyssenKrupp and India-based Tata Steel announced plans to combine their European steel-making businesses. The final agreement was signed in June 2018. The deal would have structured the European assets as ThyssenKrupp Tata Steel, a 50-50 joint venture headquartered in Amsterdam and created the second-largest steel producer in Europe. The merger was finally prohibited by the EU Commission in 2019 for competitive concerns.
Steel Americas.
In 2013, ThyssenKrupp sold its US steel business to ArcelorMittal and Nippon Steel for $1.55 billion. In February 2017, it agreed to sell its Brazilian steel business CSA to Ternium for €1.5 billion. These two transactions meant that Thyssenkrupp fully parted from the Steel Americas business.
On 11 May 2007, ThyssenKrupp AG announced an investment of €3.1 billion for a project consisting of building new carbon steel and stainless steel processing facilities in southern Alabama that would employ 2,700 people when fully operational. The project, along with a multibillion-dollar greenfield steel-making facility in Brazil, is a cornerstone of ThyssenKrupp's new global expansion strategy into the North American and NAFTA high-value carbon steel markets. The company announced that the investment was increased to $4.6 billion in 2010. As of the date of the announcement, the investment was the largest private economic development investment in Alabama's history and the largest by a German company in the U.S. The site selection announcement came after several months of competition involving several southeastern sites which were eventually narrowed between a site on the Mississippi River in Convent, Louisiana, and a site on the Tombigbee River, in Calvert, Alabama in North Mobile County, about 40 miles north of Mobile. The site in Alabama was eventually chosen. Groundbreaking on the Calvert facilities was held in November 2007. The carbon steel and stainless steel companies are independent and operate under different management teams. Co-locating both facilities on the same site enabled the company to optimize the investment in infrastructure and in some shared processing.
The carbon steel company, ThyssenKrupp Steel USA, which represented seventy percent of the overall project investment and hiring, consists of a state-of-the-art hot strip mill, cold rolling mill, and four hot-dip galvanizing lines. The hot strip mill began operations in July 2010, the cold roll mill in September 2010, and the first of the hot-dip galvanizing lines in March 2011. The company projects to be fully operational in late 2011 and employ approximately 1,800 people at that time. ThyssenKrupp Stainless USA projects to employ approximately 900 people when fully operational in late 2012. At full production, ThyssenKrupp Steel USA will have the capacity to produce 4 million metric tons of carbon steel for NAFTA customers in the automotive, construction, appliance, pipe and tube, and service center industries. In July 2011, the carbon steel project was awarded "Best Greenfield Technology" by "American Metal Market", considered to be the longest continuously published newspaper in the metals industry. ThyssenKrupp Stainless USA built a cold roll mill and is in the process of building a melt shop.
Additionally, the Alabama State Port Authority invested over $100 million to build a state-of-the-art transloading slab terminal on the southern tip of Pinto Island in Mobile Bay to service the inbound raw material slabs for the upriver carbon steel facility. Raw material slabs shipped to the Alabama facility from ThyssenKrupp CSA are transloaded from Panamax ships at the terminal onto shallow draft barges for transport upriver to the facility. The terminal is equipped with three wide-span gantry cranes with state-of-the-art magnetic lifting gear designed by ThyssenKrupp, and it utilizes RFID technology to read identifiers on each slab and provide up-to-date inventory records that include each slab's location and weight. The same magnetic technology is also used at ThyssenKrupp's Calvert facility. The terminal was necessary to Alabama's award of the project since the Tombigbee River depth and lack of turning basins prohibit deep draft ship navigation to the site in Calvert.
The world steel industry peaked in 2007, just as the company spent $12 billion to build the two most modern mills in the world, in Alabama and Brazil. The worldwide Great Recession started in 2008. Heavy cutbacks in construction combined with sharply lowered demand, and prices fell 40%. ThyssenKrupp lost $11 billion on its two new plants, which sold steel below the cost of production. ThyssenKrupp's stainless steel division, Inoxum, including the stainless portion of the US plant, was sold to Finnish stainless steel company Outokumpu in 2012. Finally in 2013, ThyssenKrupp offered the remaining portion of the plant for sale at under $4 billion. They sold it the following year for $1.55 billion.
In April 2015, ThyssenKrupp announced it would be investing more than €800 million in the North American region by 2020 to take advantage of the economy’s reindustrialization.
ThyssenKrupp Tailored Blanks.
In September 2012 ThyssenKrupp agreed to sell the automotive components manufacturer Tailored Blanks to the China-based Wuhan Iron and Steel Corporation for an undisclosed price. At the time of the agreement Tailored Blanks had annual sales of around 700 million euros and a global market share of about 40 percent in automotive laser-welded blanks.
ThyssenKrupp Elevator.
In February 2020, ThyssenKrupp AG's board announced that it would sell its elevator segment to Advent International, Cinven, and RAG foundation for $18.9 billion. The transaction closed in July 2020; stand-alone company is named TK Elevator.
Employees.
As of 2020, the company had over 100,000 employees worldwide. Following a financial struggle in 2020, and a loss of over €5.5 billion, ThyssenKrupp announced that it will be cutting over 11,000 jobs, 7,000 of which are located in Germany.
Products and sales.
ThyssenKrupp generates 33% of its consolidated sales in its home market. The rest of the European Union (EU) (28%) and the NAFTA region (21%) are the key trading partners for business and exports outside Germany. ThyssenKrupp companies hold leading positions with their products in numerous international markets.
Business areas.
The operations are organized in five business areas:
Construction of the corporate headquarters began in 2007. The first buildings were complete in 2010; the second phase of the building was completed in June 2015. Situated in the west of Essen, the corporate campus was designed by Chaix & Morel et associeés (Paris) and JSWD Architekten (Cologne). Their design was selected for construction in an architectural design competition in 2006.
Controversies.
Price fixing.
In November 2006, five elevator manufacturers, including ThyssenKrupp, were found guilty of price fixing by the EU, over nine years, along with competitors Otis Elevator Co., Schindler Group, Kone and Mitsubishi Elevator Europe. A few months later on 21 February 2007, ThyssenKrupp was fined €479 million by the EU (Otis was fined $US295 million). The EU Competition Commission reported that the companies had worked to rig bids for procurement contracts, share markets, and fix prices between at least 1995 and 2004. The Commission reported that the companies "did not contest the facts" found by EU regulators, noting none of the accused requested a hearing to answer the allegations. The fines totaled US$1.3 billion.
In July 2012, the German Bundeskartellamt served fines totalling €124.5 million on ThyssenKrupp GfT Gleistechnik GmbH, Essen (€103m), Stahlberg Roensch GmbH, Seevetal, which since 2010 belongs to the Vossloh group (€13m), TSTG Schienen Technik GmbH & Co. KG, Duisburg, a subsidiary of the Voestalpine group (€4.5m) and Voestalpine BWG GmbH & Co. KG, Butzbach, another Voestalpine subsidiary (€4m) for price-fixing of steel railway lines and points blades supplied to Deutsche Bahn, the German state railway. According to Andreas Mundt, president of the Bundeskartellamt, "For many years the rail suppliers have guaranteed each other virtually constant shares of Deutsche Bahn's contract volume. The cartel members monitored compliance with the contract volume quotas, assigned each other projects, and set protective prices in order to steer the contract award process.” The proceedings had been triggered by an application for leniency filed by the Austrian company Voestalpine AG. Investigations into further companies are ongoing.
Turin plant fire and trial.
On the early morning of 6 December 2007, an accident on the annealing and pickling line of the ThyssenKrupp plant in Turin, Italy, caused the death of seven steelworkers.
The accident happened between 00:45 and 00:48, when the eight workers that were then on duty attempted to extinguish a localized small pool fire with CO2 fire extinguishers and a fire hydrant, without success. Roughly 400L of hydraulic oil escaped during the rupture of a hydraulic circuit that caused a violent jet fire and engulfed the workers that were fighting the fire.
CEO Espenhahn has been charged by the State prosecutor of Turin with "voluntary multiple murder with eventual malice" ("omicidio volontario multiplo con dolo eventuale"), while five other managers and executives have been charged with "culpable murder with conscious guilt". On Friday 15 April 2011, Espenhahn and all the other indictees were pronounced guilty of all charges; Espenhahn has been sentenced to 16 years and 6 months in jail and to a lifelong ban from holding public office. Prior to the court case, Espenhahn was transferred from Italy and is now believed to reside in Brazil. On 23 February 2013, the Appellate Court changed the sentence for Espenhahn to culpable murder, not recognizing the voluntary murder, thus reducing the conviction. Convictions for the other managers were reduced as well.
In May 2016, the appeal court reduced the sentences for Espenhahn down to 9 years and 8 months, the other 5 managers (4 Italians and 1 German) between 6 and 7 years. Priegnitz the German manager, was sentenced to 6 years and 3 months. According to the bilateral laws between Germany and Italy, the convicted can serve the term in his home country and with accordance to this countries' laws. Since accounts of first-degree murder have been appealed down to aggravated negligent manslaughter, the German convicts are expecting further reductions that would eventually not exceed 5 years.
Bribery and conflict of interest.
ThyssenKrupp is suspected of corruption in deals made in Israel, Turkey, South Africa and also in Pakistan, where the deal did not mature. In Greece, the defense minister was sentenced to prison for accepting a bribe from a consortium in which one of the members was ThyssenKrupp.
Incidents.
ThyssenKrupp has been the victim of major, organised hacking attacks on several occasions, targeting the company's trade secrets.
On 8 December 2016, it emerged that the company was attacked in February of that year. Internally uncovered in April 2016, it took their IT team around six months to fix. The hack is thought to have originated from South-East Asia and was successful in retrieving information from various departments, including the plant engineering division.
In 2012, ThyssenKrupp and other European companies have been attacked by Chinese sources.