| Stefan Quandt | |
| Birth Date: | 9 May 1966 |
| Birth Place: | Bad Homburg, West Germany |
| Education: | Karlsruhe Institute of Technology |
| Occupation: | Businessman |
| Parents: | Herbert Quandt Johanna Quandt |
| Children: | 1 |
| Relatives: | Susanne Klatten (sister) Silvia Quandt (half-sister) |
Stefan Quandt (born 9 May 1966) is a German billionaire heir, engineer and industrialist. As of October 2021, his net worth is estimated at US$23.2 billion[1] and ranked at number 89 on Bloomberg Billionaires Index.[2]
Quandt was born in Bad Homburg to Herbert Quandt, a German industrialist and prominent Nazi,[3] and Johanna Quandt. He earned a degree from the University of Karlsruhe where he studied economics and engineering,[1] from 1987 to 1993.
From 1993–1994, Quandt worked for the Boston Consulting Group in Munich. From 1994 to 1996 he worked for Datacard Group of Minneapolis as a marketing manager in Hong Kong.
On his father's death in 1982 Quandt inherited 17.4% of BMW,[4] the company his father had saved from bankruptcy in 1959. From further purchases he later owned 23.7% of the company.[1] In 1997, he joined the company's supervisory board.[5]
Following his mother’s death in 2015, Quandt’s voting stake in BMW temporarily increased to 34.19 percent, above a 30 percent threshold which triggered a compulsory takeover offer under German rules.[6] He subsequently asked the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) to be excused from these rules. In 2018, Quandt became BMW’s largest single shareholder when his direct ownership increased with shares inherited from his mother, giving him a so-called “blocking stake” of 25.83 percent, worth 13.4 billion euros ($16.6 billion).[7] He currently serves BMW as a deputy chairman of the supervisory board.[8]
Quandt also inherited from his father substantial holdings in other companies, many of which he has been running through his holding company, Delton AG, since 1989. These include:
With his mother, Quandt owned 18.3% of Gemplus International, a large digital security company, before its merger to form Gemalto in 2006.
With a second holding company, Aqton SE, Quandt manages other investments, including in renewable energies:[10]
Through the non-profit Aqtivator, Quandt supports projects for children, youth, and families with a focus on education, integration, and equal opportunity.[12] [13]
Following the 2013 elections, Quandt – together with his mother and his sister – made donations to the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) totaling 690,000 euros.[21] [22] Ahead of the 2017 elections, he gave 50,000 euros each to both the CDU and liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP).[23]
In autumn 2005, Quandt married Katharina, a software engineer. They have a daughter, born on New Year's Eve that same year. He generally keeps a low profile. They live in Frankfurt, Germany.
The Hanns-Joachim-Friedrichs-Award winning documentary film The Silence of the Quandts[24] 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,[25] 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 researched and compiled by Bonn historian, Joachim Scholtyseck, that was released in 2011 concluded: "The Quandts were linked inseparably with the crimes of the Nazis".[25] no compensation, apology or memorial at the site of one of their factories, have been permitted. BMW was not implicated in the report.[25]