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Takeover prevented
: Minister of Economic Affairs
Peter Altmaier
Photo: Fabian Sommer / dpa
The radio technology company IMST, based in Kamp-Lintfort near Düsseldorf, recently reported sales of just 14 million euros.
And yet the company almost landed on the table of the federal cabinet on Wednesday of this week.
The reason: Managing Director
Peter Waldow
(63), founder
Ingo Wolff
(82) and their employees, who together hold a large part of the shares, want to sell their company to China.
But nothing will come of it: At the behest of Economics Minister
Peter Altmaier
(62, CDU), the federal cabinet prohibited the deal on Wednesday.
On the other hand, IMST wants to go to court, announced managing director Waldow to manager magazin.
The IMST boss accuses Altmaier of numerous mistakes in his argumentation and feels "politically instrumentalized".
The case shows how skeptical German politicians are now regarding company sales to non-European buyers.
The mistrust of states like China is just as great as the effort to protect the domestic technology base from competitors.
A deal like the takeover of the robotics specialist Kuka to the Chinese Midea group in 2016 for almost four billion euros seems hardly conceivable today.
The export nation Germany, which is dependent on open markets, is thus joining the global trend towards protectionism that US President
Donald Trump
(74) has been sparking for years.
Minister of Economic Affairs Altmaier was one of the first in this country to propose a renaissance in strategic industrial policy.
When he presented a corresponding paper at the beginning of 2019, the resistance from the middle class and from his own party was so great that he almost lost his office.
Since the corona crisis made the federal government the savior of almost the entire economy, the resistance to Altmaier's plans has collapsed.
With the Economic Stabilization Fund (WSF), he now has a vehicle worth up to 600 billion euros with which he can implement this new form of state economy - for example at Lufthansa and the travel company Tui.
Did Altmaier's officials mix up numbers?
In the case of IMST, Altmaier justified his intervention by stating that a sale of IMST would mean "a threat to public order or security in the Federal Republic of Germany".
According to the Foreign Trade Ordinance (Paragraph 59), the federal government can prohibit a sale in such a case.
This emerges from the draft prohibition notice from the Federal Ministry of Economics (BMWi), which manager magazin has.
But why does Germany's security depend on a mini-company from Kamp-Lintfort for Peter Altmaier?
IMST stands for "Institute for Mobile and Satellite Radio Technology" and started in 1992 as a spin-off from the University of Duisburg-Essen.
Company boss Waldow and founder Wolff are professors for electrical engineering at the University of Duisburg-Essen.
Wolff has been retired for a long time.
Your engineering office and system house specializes in radio systems.
The know-how extends to communication from and with satellites as well as to the upcoming 5G and 6G cellular standards or autonomous driving.
IMST sees itself as one of the world's leading research companies in radio communications.
Altmaier's officials present the company as an important supplier for domestic military technology.
For example, they state that IMST technology is in alleged products for the German armed forces - for example in the TerraSAR-X reconnaissance satellite.
IMST boss Waldow, however, thinks that this is pulled by the hair: almost ten years ago, IMST only contributed a very simple component to the satellite, which "even a student with an intermediate diploma could have designed".
In addition, the satellite that the aviation company Airbus built is for civil use.
Airbus IMST has also confirmed this in writing.
The Bundeswehr later only acquired data from the satellite.
The Chinese got on board in 2018
Another argument by Altmaier is the public funding from which IMST has benefited.
In the past ten years, the company has received 127 million euros from the state for various research projects, calculate Altmaiers Mannen - IMST owes an average of almost 40 percent of its sales to taxpayers during this time.
IMST boss Waldow replied that the ministerial officials had apparently mixed up the numbers: A presentation by IMSF for the BMWi shows that the funding from 2010 to 2019 only amounted to 40 million euros, but the total turnover during this time was 127 million Euro.
If Waldow is right, the BMWi officials would have confused sales and subsidies.
Such subsidies serve to "strengthen Germany's technological sovereignty and would ultimately flow off to China without prohibition," writes the BMWi in its reasoning.
In the event of a sale, IMST's know-how would also "contribute to China's armament".
The officials have not stated that in view of Beijing's increasingly aggressive foreign policy, it would also be politically sensitive to sell a high-tech company backed by taxpayers' money to China.
Especially since the alleged buyer Addsino provokes considerable stomach grief in Berlin.
The company, with annual sales of almost $ 600 million, is primarily active in the armaments sector and cites the corporate goal of "strengthening China's armed forces through technology".
Addsino is in turn a subsidiary of the China Aerospace and Industry Group (CASIC), an armaments company with almost $ 40 billion in sales and 150,000 employees, which reports directly to the State Council of the People's Republic.
IMST boss Waldow vehemently opposes being classified as a military technology supplier - that is simply wrong, he says: "In 28 years we have never received an order from the Bundeswehr."
All publicly funded research results that emerged from the IMST are also published in the context of scientific publications and are therefore accessible to everyone who is knowledgeable.
In addition, they have been working with the Chinese partners for many years.
Without their funding, IMST would have "got into great economic difficulties" this year, says Waldow, because the corona pandemic has also hit his business considerably.
The IMST owners had already agreed a first deal with their Chinese partners in 2018.
At that time, the Chinese took over about 22 percent of the IMST voting rights.
That was just below the test threshold that was valid at the time, which the federal government lowered to 10 percent at the end of 2018 at the initiative of Altmaier.
In mid-2019, the Chinese then applied to the BMWi for approval to take over almost 95 percent of the voting rights.
For more than a year, the partners fought with the federal government to get their deal approved.
Now you'll see each other again soon before the Berlin Administrative Court.
cn / slo
