Viessmann – The painful way to sell

Dusseldorf Shortly before the conclusion of the negotiations, there were sweets. “We had worked through the night,” says one of the consultants involved. “Then someone from Viessmann’s family office came and brought everyone gummy bears, Snickers and Twix.” A signal, he interprets it, that we are working together and on an equal footing.

And indeed, on Tuesday, April 25, 2023, the contract was in place: Max Viessmann is selling the core business of his 106-year-old family company to the US group Carrier Global, a multinational conglomerate with a turnover of 20 billion dollars. The area of ​​air conditioning solutions, which in principle constitutes the traditional German heating engineer, now belongs to one of the largest air conditioning manufacturers in the world. A German family business voluntarily places itself in the hands of a global corporation. When has this ever happened?