At some point you stop counting the many crises.
War, inflation, energy crisis, corona wave, aviation chaos are the perceived top five, but not yet the complete hit list.
Some aren't even listening anymore and just hope that somehow they'll get to their vacation spot, that the money will be enough and that Putin won't completely turn off the gas in Germany from mid-July.
Others are clamoring for help from the state, be it an energy saving bonus (on this subject
Robert Habeck
, Minister for Economic Affairs : "You won't get it, old man") or, even more absurd, for young people who are supposed to do voluntary social service in the baggage halls of airports.
Neither gets us anywhere.
Then there is a third group that is bored with the constant talk of crisis.
Who sees a crisis as an opportunity and tries to make the best of it.
One of them is
Markus Villig
, head of mobility provider
Bolt
.
Even in the currently unprofitable carsharing industry, he continues to believe in success and is expanding his team while the competition is laying off employees.
Another is
Klaus Michael Kühne
.
The logistics billionaire with the particularly deep pockets uses the aviation crisis as an opportunity to increase its stake in
Lufthansa
to 15 percent.
And then there are dozens of large German family businesses that are helping to shape the change in their industries with hefty profits and high liquidity behind them.
These include the pharmaceutical supplier
Sartorius
, the heating
specialist Viessmann
and the logistics company
Hellmann
.
You can read the large overview of Germany's family businesses here.
The following applies to these entrepreneurs: Forget the word crisis, dude.
The business news of the day:
Boris Johnson resigns as party leader:
British Prime Minister
Boris Johnson
resigns as leader of his Conservative Party.
But he wants to continue as prime minister until a successor is elected, Johnson said in London on Thursday.
He himself was elected to office by his party almost three years ago.
Johnson had come under massive pressure in the past few days.
Around 50 cabinet members and parliamentarian government officials resigned from their posts in a bid to force Johnson to step down.
The opposition is now demanding new elections.
Germany's largest landlord throttles the heating temperature at night:
The real estate
group Vonovia
wants to lower the temperature of the gas central heating to 17 degrees at night to save gas.
The hot water supply is not affected by this decision.
Vonovia owns around 550,000 apartments in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
12.5 percent more wages are not enough for the port workers:
In the collective bargaining dispute over the wages of workers at German seaports, the sixth round of negotiations also failed - although the employer side offered a wage increase of up to 12.5 percent.
According to the
Verdi
union , this offer is not enough to offset inflation.
Strikes are now threatening again at the German ports of Hamburg, Emden, Bremen, Bremerhaven and Wilhelmshaven.
The personality of the day:
Elon Musk is the father of twins: According to a media report,
Tesla
boss
Elon Musk
and
Shivon Zilis
have been parents of twins since November.
Musk and Zilis filed a request in April to have the children's names changed to "bear their father's last name," Business Insider reports, citing court documents.
Zilis is the director of Musk's neurotechnology start-up
, Neuralink
.
What else kept us busy:
VW car dealers flee in a billion-dollar merger:
electromobility, direct sales, online trading and Co. are fundamentally changing the business model in the car trade.
Many smaller car dealers fear for their sales and their margins.
According to many experts, the main thing that helps against this is size.
Now four
Volkswagen dealers
, who are already relatively large, are merging to form a real mega-dealer with more than 40,000 cars sold a year and sales of more than one billion euros.
The smaller, still independent competition is now afraid of the new retail giant.
My recommendation for the evening:
By 2030, 60 percent of all
new cars sold by
Volkswagen will be purely battery-powered.
In 2021 it was just 5 percent.
If Wolfsburg's electric dreams are to come true, a large number of battery cells are needed.
Chief Technology Officer Thomas Schmall
is responsible for this
.
He must build and run Volkswagen's gigafactories.
Even Federal Chancellor
Olaf Scholz
announced that he would be laying the foundation stone for the first plant in Salzgitter today.
A lot of pressure for Schmall, who told our colleague Michael Freitag in an interview why he still sleeps better than a year ago.
Cordially, your Kai Lange
