Maybe you'll be unfamiliar with the name of this company. But as the world's steel giant after ArcelorMittal and South Korea's POSCO and one of the world's top three elevator and escalator manufacturers, the elevator in Beijing Capital Airport's Terminal 3 and the world's first maglev commercial train in Shanghai have his technology and products. ThyssenKrupp, a combination of the steel-based thyssen company and the former arms empire Krupp, is a well-deserved industrial giant in the world, but no one knows its name.
In 1997, Germany's Thyssen Steel and the military company Krupp announced a merger. Both companies are at the forefront of the steel industry, and their backgrounds are even more prominent. The Thyssen Group was the largest consortium in West Germany in the 20th century, with heavy industries such as steel being its most important business. Its founder Augustin Thyssen established its first own coal and steel mining enterprise in Duisburg, Germany in 1890, and until the beginning of the First World War, the company's business had covered the whole of Europe, including coal mining, steelmaking, machine building, transportation, arms manufacturing, etc., becoming a famous steel king. After Augustine's death, his son Fritz acquired dominance in the German metallurgical industry by annexing several companies in 1926. At the same time, as the chairman of the supervisory board of the joint company, he held a huge stake and became a famous monopoly capitalist in Germany, known as the "King of the Ruhr".
After World War I and before World War II, Thyssen controlled 25% of The Union Steel AG's coal production in Germany, and coke production, pig iron production and steel production accounted for 20%, 38% and 40% of the market share, respectively. As a chaebol on the rich side, the Thyssen group became one of the supporters of Hitler's rise to power. In 1932, Fritz presided over the meeting of Hitler and 300 capitalists in the Ruhr region, which became one of the major events in German history of capitalist collusion with the Nazis. As a member of the Nazi Party and a member of the Reichstag, Fritz served Hitler during World War II. After the war, the Allies confiscated all of Thyssen's assets and later returned them in full. In 1953, Thyssen reorganized and, after merging several companies, once again became the largest crude steel producer in Europe and the fifth largest producer in the world. In 1983, Thyssen Steel spun off from the group and began merger negotiations with Krupp Steel. As of September 1997, prior to the merger, Thyssen Steel employed 39,000 people.
As another major member of thyssenkrupp, Krupp's family history can be compiled entirely into a book. Perhaps the name is no longer as thunderous today, but it was once the loudest surname in Europe, the richest family, the world's most famous arms dealer as early as the 16th century, when Aldente Krupp began to do business, after his son Anton took over, with the arrival of the Thirty Years' War in Europe, the Krupp family began to participate in the manufacture of firearms for the first time.
In 1811, the Krupp steel foundry was officially built, and after not being satisfied with the production of civilian steel, Alfred, the head of the time, realized that the state was the biggest customer and weapons were the most attractive commodities. So Alfred built the first cannons and sold them to William, king of Prussia at the time. In the summer of 1870, the whole world watched the war between Prussia and France. European public opinion, led by The Times, is widely believed that the war would end with the French invading the Lane River. You must know that on the throne of the French Empire at that time, sitting was Napoleon's nephew. He had an army that had been fighting for twenty or thirty years, and the world's armies followed the example of France. On the Prussian side, the farmers on the Rhine were busy harvesting grain, and many families had prepared french tricolors and hung them on the roof as soon as the French arrived. The following story is known in the history books, and the Franco-Prussian War almost turned into a one-sided massacre by Prussia. A few months later, King William I of Prussia ascended the throne at Versailles and proclaimed himself Emperor of the Second German Empire, and Germany was born. Later historians, when analyzing the factors of Germany's victory in this war, inevitably mentioned the Krupp cannon. Since then, Krupp has been flooded with massive orders and has become the world's largest military factory. Li Hongzhang of the Qing Dynasty once ordered 6793 cannons of various calibers from Krupp. In the 16 years from the Franco-Prussian War to Alfred's death, Krupp was everywhere in 15 wars around the world.
After this, Rudolf Diesel invented the internal combustion engine, Szyrzem Maxim invented the machine gun, Nobel invented the nitroglycerin explosive, and they all sold or leased all their patents to Krupp for use, and the shape of the war changed. But the next two world wars exposed Krupp to a fatal flaw.
In 1918, Krupp made a final counterattack on behalf of Germany before the end of World War I, pulling out the most rare weapon in human history, the Paris Cannon. The cannon weighed 150 tons and had a barrel length of 37 meters, and it could shoot shells into the ionosphere 26 miles high and Paris 120 kilometers away that could not be intercepted. But this mighty-sounding cannon, which required 60 soldiers to operate together, was a cannon that could only cause panic among parisians but had no actual combat significance, and became the best embodiment of the extreme straight male cancer of the Germanic nation. They exalt masculinity and believe in some kind of mythical giant totem. The defeat in World War I destroyed several of Krupp's factories. After the outbreak of World War II, Krupp once again became the driving force of the German war machine, forcing hundreds of thousands of prisoner-of-war laborers from the Yugoslav region to work day and night to convert chromium, manganese, aluminum and copper from the occupied areas into weapons in the hands of the Germans. From 88 mm anti-tank cannons and Tiger heavy tanks to XXIII submarines, while making a fortune in the war, members of the Krupp family were also cursed and killed in the war. After the end of World War II, Krupp ushered in the "Twilight of the Gods", and almost all of the heavy industrial equipment was systematically demolished and moved to the Territory of the Allies as war reparations. Boilers were sent to Ukraine, cast iron furnaces were sent to Britain, cannons and cutting machines were sent to France, 10,000-ton hydraulic presses were assigned to Yugoslavia, and even wall tiles were removed and sent to the Netherlands.
But from the moment North Korea's 150 T34 tanks crossed the 38th Parallel, the West was determined to revive Germany. Alfred Krupp Jr., who was sentenced to twelve years in prison, was released from prison early, and within 10 years Krupp was revived. By the early 1960s, it had an annual turnover of $1.5 billion and was one of the top ten companies in Europe. Its business scope includes shipbuilding, complete equipment, bridge construction, chemicals, textiles, plastics, water treatment, oil refining and nuclear reactors. The revival in Krupp also concealed a crisis when the Allies demanded that seven steel mills during Nazi Germany withdraw from the coal and steel business, and the arrogant little Alfred, the heir to the family, even set up his office in the noisy street to show his opposition. He said that my great-grandfather had worked here and started out in steel, and I had to stick to his life's work. As a result, Krupp, which was tough with the times, could only rely on loans to develop, and the interest on loans was fixed. During the period of rapid economic development in West Germany in the mid-1950s, the annual interest rate of short-term loans was as high as 16%, and once the economy was depressed, the capital chain was easily tight or even broken. By the time the economic crisis in the Federal Republic of Germany reached its peak in early 1967, Krupp had already owed $1.2 billion in debt to 263 banks and insurance companies. While it made a profit of $15 million last year, it needed to pay up to $75 million in interest.
On April 1, 1967, Krupp announced the reorganization of the company into a joint-stock company, returning to the family's original business - tableware and farm tool production. However, the coal and steel industry, which was hit hard by the European economic crisis after 1966, was already a sunset industry, and Krupp had no way to return to heaven. After the Federal Republic of Germany reached out to him, Alfred Jr. died three months later, the cause of death is unknown, and his son accepted the condition of receiving 1 million a year from the company to renounce Krupp's inheritance. Later, he died of AIDS without leaving any children. At this point, the Krupp Empire was declared to be over. In 1991, it merged with The German Company Hesch Steel. In 1997, it merged with Thyssen, and the name thyssenkrupp is still in use today.
Krupp cannons, Gustav heavy guns, the world's largest wheel bucket excavator, submarines with a depth of 11,000 meters in the 1960s, telescopes with a diameter of 100 meters, as a military enterprise serving the fascists, Krupp has committed many crimes, but from another point of view, it has also greatly promoted the progress of science and technology, and the scientific and technological level accumulated by Krupp in the production of weapons has also laid a solid foundation for its future glory in the civilian field.
Today, the combined thyssenkrupp has several businesses, and as a German company, it has always maintained a low-key style and does not attach great importance to brand promotion. Although the German company had reached out to China, which was still in the Qing Dynasty, a century and a half ago, it did not establish a brand division in China until July 2018. In 2016, thyssenkrupp participated in the expansion of the Panama River, providing 14 innovative elevators. Due to the extreme complexity of the project, the thyssenkrupp Elevator team needed to take into account every technical detail. For example, all elevator components must be explosion-proof to ensure proper use in the harshest climatic conditions. In Panama, canal construction was the first engineering project to incorporate this safety feature.
ThyssenKrupp, which lost its military business and was on the road to de-steelification, also launched a new LOGO in the same year in 2016, and the unified bid change was still given a major mission by thyssenkrupp. The company's management said: In this way, we let the outside world know that we not only have steel, elevators, but also many other businesses, and hope that people will hear about thyssenkrupp, just like Siemens, Toshiba and other companies.
