Since 2017 he has led the group together with Joachim Janssen, who is now retiring.
(Photo: Sandra Steh Photography / Viessmann)
Dusseldorf Max Viessmann is now alone at the head of the Viessmann Group. The 32-year-old is one of the youngest bosses of a billionaire company. The Viessmann Group employs almost 13,000 people and had sales of around 2.8 billion euros in 2020.
Viessmann had managed the group together with Joachim Janssen since 2017, who is now being retired. The 64-year-old joined Martin Viessmann’s management board in 2007 as CFO. Before Max Viessmann’s rise, he was CEO for two years.
There are comparable constellations at the listed family company Fielmann with sales of more than 1.6 billion euros, which has been led by Marc Fielmann, 32, for two years, and at the Berner Group with a billion euros in sales, where Christian Berner, 37, at the top.
Like his father Martin, who is now Chairman of the Board of Directors, Max Viessmann is not satisfied with just working within the family company founded in 1917. He also has a sense of political mission. At the climate summit in Glasgow, for example, he was one of the very few family entrepreneurs to speak about the climate challenges in the building sector. Viessmann responded to these challenges earlier than other companies.
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Because the building sector causes around 30 percent of carbon dioxide emissions worldwide and also in this country. This year, the German building sector has also missed its climate target by two million tons of CO2, as the news agency dpa reported.
Viessmann sees a need for action: “Every day without solutions is at the expense of our carbon footprint,” he says. Around 85 percent of the buildings in Germany have so far only been partially or not at all renovated. At this rate, “you don’t have to calculate for long to understand that climate neutrality will be a challenge in 2045”.
To ensure that Viessmann can also make faster progress in this area, the young company boss signed a cooperation agreement with the system construction company Goldbeck from Bielefeld at the end of November. The family business has a turnover of more than four billion euros.
The two companies want to jointly research and develop in the future as well as merge systems and components in buildings – all with the aim of promoting the decarbonization of the building sector.
More: These are the 50 climate pioneers in the German economy