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February 5, 1920 – Siemens joins Osram
Word and image trademark of Osram GmbH KG, 1919
Light bulb production was one of the fastest growing areas of the international electrical industry before World War One. The wolfram lamp with a filament made of wolfram which was produced from 1905 on was part of this development The companies involved agreed on the brand name of OSRAM; this trademark referred to both the osmium process and the wolfram metal and in 1906 was patented by the inventor Carl Auer von Welsbach at the Imperial Patent Office in Berlin.
After the loss of the foreign markets following World War One, the three leading German light bulb producers, AEG, Siemens & Halske and the Deutsche Gasglühlicht AG (Auer-Gesellschaft), decided to bundle their joint interests with the aim of holding their own against the foreign competition and regaining lost markets. The decision was made easier by the fact that the lamp forms and types had already been standardized in 1911.
The Deutsche Gasglühlicht AG had already outsourced its light bulb business in November 1918 and founded the Osram-Werke GmbH KG for this purpose. On February 5, 1920, Siemens & Halske and AEG joined this enterprise as limited partners. The start of the first fiscal year and the founding date of the company were registered retroactively as July 1, 1919.
In the 1930s, Osram was one of the largest manufacturers in the world; in Germany alone it had market share of a good 70 percent. To open up the foreign markets, numerous sales agencies in the form of separate companies supported by foreign capital were founded. Osram maintained its leading position on the world market in particular due to an intensive exchange of experience with international manufacturers. In 1956, Osram GmbH KG was converted into a limited liability company (GmbH) for tax reasons.
The crisis at AEG, which resulted in Siemens AG taking over AEG’s shares in KWU and TU, also gave the then CEO Bernhard Plettner (1914–1997) the opportunity to acquire the Osram shares as well. At the time Siemens held 43 percent, AEG 36 percent and the General Electric Company 21 percent of the company shares. After Siemens had acquired the AEG shares in 1976, Siemens’ stake in Osram rose to 79 percent. Two years later, in 1978, General Electric offered Siemens the alternative of transferring the capital majority and hence the management of Osram to GE or acquiring the General Electric shares itself. Siemens opted for takeover.
With this decision Bernhard Plettner showed farsightedness – Osram subsequently developed extremely well both technologically and on the revenue and profit front. From 1978, when Plettner took over as chairman of Osram’s Supervisory Board, the company, where Bernhard Plettner’s younger brother Helmut (1926–1992) had been Chairman of the Managing Board since 1976, was again in the black. It could truly be said that the stagnation in which the company had been mired since the beginning of the 1970s had been overcome: for the first time since 1969/70 Osram was able to build up reserves.
At the beginning of the 1980s, Osram was the fourth largest lamp producer in the world with 28 production facilities, 18 of them abroad. In Latin America the company was the third most important on the market, in the Europe it came second and in Germany first. From 1989 Osram GmbH was managed as a unit with its own legal status. Who would have thought in 1920 that OSRAM would one day have around 39,000 employees worldwide in 46 plants in 17 countries and generate revenue of EUR 4.68 billion (2010)?
February 5, 2011 – Dr. Frank Wittendorfer