Messer publishes 44 years of economic history

The Frankfurt industrial gases specialist Messer has now posted its complete Company Reports for the past 44 years on its Internet website messergroup.com. For each year, historian and author Jörg Leszenski has written German informative sketches of the industrial setting which provide a unique and independent view of the company's history, not just for economic historians. Since 2004, Messer has once more been owner-managed, with Stefan Messer as Chairman of the Board. From 1965 to 2001, Messer, at that time a subsidiary of Hoechst AG, operated under the name Messer Griesheim.

It is only against the background of the overall economic conditions that the special features of Messer's history become clear. Thus, the texts, read in parallel with one another, offer engrossing insights into the strategies adopted by the company to take advantage of its market opportunities since the end of the 1960s in an ever-faster changing world economy, but also into the rash expansion strategies which drove Messer to the brink of ruin in the 1990s. It also reveals the firm wish and attempts by parts of the founder family, finally successful in 2004, to return the whole group into family hands and to run it as an owner-managed enterprise in a globalised economy.

The history of the family firm, now 111 years old, has, right from the start, been closely intertwined with the overall economic development of its core markets and the sector-specific economic cycles in the chemicals and mechanical engineering industries. The Company Reports archived from 1966 to today and the reports on the economic setting reflect, firstly, the economic cycles, as well as the growing global interdependence of national economies and also the rise of new boom regions which, in the last third of the 20th century, increasingly challenged the development of Messer Griesheim GmbH after its formation in 1965 and which still have a significant influence on the development of the Messer Group today.

For the management of the Messer Group GmbH, learning from the past means, in particular, preservation of the family firm corporate culture in the future, continued financial independence and the further development of the Group with the help of strategies oriented towards the long term.

Messer is one of the leading industrial gas companies, and is active in over 30 countries in Europe and Asia, as well as Peru, with over 60 operating companies. Its international activities are managed from Frankfurt am Main, whilst management of core technical functions – logistics, engineering, production and applications engineering – is undertaken from Krefeld. In 2008, about 4,700 employees generated consolidated sales of €795 million.
From acetylene to xenon, the Messer Group has one of the most diverse product portfolios on the market – it produces industrial gases such as oxygen, nitrogen, argon, carbon dioxide, hydrogen, helium, shielding gases for welding, specialty gases, medical gases and many different gas mixtures.
The Messer Group has state-of-the-art research and competence centers in which it develops applied technologies for the use of gases in almost every sector of industry, in food technology and environmental technology, medicine as well as research and science.

Messer Group GmbH
Vice President
Corporate Communications
Diana Buss
Gahlingspfad 31
47803 Krefeld

Phone: +49 (0) 2151 7811-251
Fax: +49 (0) 2151 7811-598
Email: diana.buss@messergroup.com
www.messergroup.com

This release was published on openPR.