The German brother and sister Stefan Quandt and Susanne Klatten received more than a billion in dividends last year. The Quandt family is a major shareholder in the Bavarian car company BMW.
Quandt and Klatten are son and daughter of the late industrialist Herbert Quandt. He risked his entire fortune to save BMW from ruin in the late 1950s, when the brand was on the verge of selling everything to arch-rival Daimler-Benz.
Although the German car company largely owes its existence to the Quandt family, originally from the Netherlands, they are not very popular. The family history is therefore a succession of dark secrets about extortion, rumbling with shares, forced labor and warm contacts with the Nazis.
In 2023, Herbert’s two children jointly own almost half of all shares in BMW and that has not done them any harm. Although about 100,000 fewer cars were sold in 2022 than the year before, turnover grew by almost a third to 142.6 billion euros. The profit amounted to 18.6 billion euros. The profit per car therefore increased considerably and that also means cash for Stefan and Susanne.
Top 10 richest Germans
According to business magazine Quote As a result, shareholders received a dividend of EUR 8.50 per share. Since they together own almost half of BMW, this means that they will be paid more than a billion. And they weren’t bad at all. Stefan is the fifth richest resident of Germany, Susanne is sixth in the German rich list.
According to Quote, the richest Germans are the Albrecht family of supermarket chain Aldi with a capital of 32.7 billion euros, Dieter Schwarz, founder of the Lidl, good for 32.18 billion euros and Klaus-Michael Kühne of transport company Kühne-Nagel with a capital of 27 billion euros.
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