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Munich (AP) - The billionaire and patriarch of the brake specialist Knorr-Bremse, Heinz Hermann Thiele, is dead. According to the company, he died unexpectedly on Tuesday at the age of 79 with his family in Munich.
Thiele became known to the general public when he rose to become Lufthansa's largest shareholder in the corona crisis last year.
He had criticized the state's intervention to save the airline, but then agreed.
In his company, which he had made a profitable world market leader for train and truck brakes with almost 30,000 employees and around seven billion euros in sales, Thiele was most recently deputy chairman and honorary chairman of the supervisory board.
He only returned to the supervisory body in June 2020 after a four-year break.
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Thiele was one of the richest Germans: the Bloomberg news agency recently estimated his fortune to be a good 20 billion dollars.
But Thiele did not inherit it - he is a self-made billionaire.
In a first obituary, the company refers to the early death of the father, which had a great impact on him.
In retrospect, he said that he had “used extremely limited financial circumstances and the father figure I am very much lacking in order to create something on his own,” the company quotes the company patriarch himself.
Born in Mainz, he started at the Munich medium-sized company Knorr-Bremse in 1969 as a clerk in the patent department when he was 28 years old.
In 1979 he became head of sales and in 1985 he took over the company.
The then company heir wanted to sell everything and devote himself only to religion, business was bad.
"Nothing was right here," Thiele later explained in a company brochure.
When no buyer was found, Thiele secured the ailing company on credit: "I made a virtue out of necessity."
He ignored the advice of a management consultancy to ditch the brake business and specialize in industrial pneumatics - and did the opposite.
Thiele was Chairman of the Management Board until 2007, Chairman of the Supervisory Board from 2007 to 2016 and its Deputy Chairman from July 2020.
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From corporate circles it was said: “He is the classic patriarch.
A decision has never been made without him. "
When “Manager Magazin” accepted Thiele into its “Business Hall of Fame” and recognized it as an “outstanding entrepreneur and driver”, the Knorr-Bremse award in the 2017 annual report was worth the first double page.
Thiele told the magazine: "I am an entrepreneur and will be entrepreneurial until my last breath."
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210223-99-564905 / 2