Fighting to Be More Than A Cog in the Machine

A German auto parts maker seeks to engineer itself a future for the post-Merkel era

- Cristina Lindblad

Klaus Rosenfeld was making a routine visit to a potential supplier in the fall of 2018 when, unexpectedly, a big opportunity presented itself. Executives at the company let it slip that it was about to be sold. The terms hadn’t been finalized, and Rosenfeld’s Schaeffler AG could cut in if it acted fast.

On the drive home to Frankfurt, Rosenfeld called Georg Schaeffler, the son of one of the company’s founders and now its chairman and main shareholder, to brief him. Before hanging up, the two men agreed to sleep on it. Less than 12 hours later, Rosenfeld had the green light to make a bid for Elmotec Statomat, a world-leading supplier of equipment used in the manufacture of electric vehicles. “We’ve never turned around a deal so fast,” says Schaeffler’s chief executive officer. “It was clear the technology would accelerate our transformation—a small step with a big impact.”

Impulse buying runs against the grain of German capitalism, which is more measured and methodical than the U.S. version. Yet in boardrooms from the Black Forest to the Baltic coast, a sense of urgency is taking hold with the realization that the German economic model is reaching its limits: Precision machining bits of metal down to micron levels of tolerance and assembling them into cars and other complex mechanical systems that are then shipped to all corners of the globe can no longer guarantee affluence for the country’s 83 million people.