Susanne Klatten (born Susanne Hanna Ursula Quandt on 28 April 1962) is the daughter of Herbert and Johanna Quandt. As of August 2015, her net worth is US$19.6 billion, and she is the richest woman in Germany and the 38th richest person in the world.
Education
Klatten was born in Bad Homburg, Germany. After gaining a degree in business finance, she worked for the advertising agency Young & Rubicam in Frankfurt from 1981 to 1983. This was followed by a course in marketing and management at the University of Buckingham, and an MBA from IMD in Lausanne specialising in advertising.
She gained further business experience in London with Dresdner Bank, the Munich branch of management consultants McKinsey and the bank Bankhaus Reuschel & Co.
Recognising that her wealth is sometimes a problem, she often worked incognito under the name Susanne Kant.
Investments
On her father’s death she inherited his 50.1% stake in pharmaceutical and chemicals manufacturer Altana.[1] She sits on Altana’s supervisory board and helped transform it into a world-class corporation in the German DAX list of 30 top companies. In 2006 Altana AG sold its pharmaceutical activities to Nycomed for €4.5 billion, leaving only its speciality chemicals business. The €4.5 billion was distributed to shareholders as a dividend. Altana maintained its stock exchange listing and Klatten remained its majority shareholder. In 2009, she bought almost all shares she did not already own in Altana.[citation needed]
Her father also left her a 12.50% stake in BMW. She was appointed to the supervisory board of BMW with her brother Stefan Quandt in 1997.
German graphite maker SGL Group said on 16 March 2009 that Klatten owns options to raise her stake in SGL from 8% to almost a quarter of the shares but no more than that.
She owns an approximately 25% stake in German wind turbine manufacturer Nordex and, in 2012, bought stakes from Dutch biotech company Paques and used oil recycling company Avista Oil of Germany.
The Hanns-Joachim-Friedrichs-Award winning documentary film The Silence of the Quandts by the German public broadcaster ARD described in October 2007 the role of the Quandt family businesses during the Second World War. The family’s Nazi past was not well known, but the documentary film revealed this to a wide audience and confronted the Quandts about the use of slave labourers in the family’s factories during World War II. As a result, five days after the showing, four family members announced, on behalf of the entire Quandt family, their intention to fund a research project in which a historian will examine the family’s activities during Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship. The independent 1,200-page study that was released in 2011 concluded: “The Quandts were linked inseparably with the crimes of the Nazis”-Joachim Scholtyseck, the Bonn historian who compiled and researched the study. As of 2008 no compensation, apology or even memorial at the site of one of their factories, have been permitted. BMW was not implicated in the report.
Klatten owns 21 percent of Bayerische Motoren Werke, the world’s largest maker of luxury vehicles. The Munich-based company’s brands include BMW, Mini and Rolls-Royce. She also has stakes in chemical company Altana, carbon producer SGL Carbon, credit card maker Entrust Datacard and turbine developer Nordex.
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