The German SpaceX is called OHB. A Bremen family has created a global space company out of nothing. With a new investor, she now wants to go even further into space.
Marco Fuchs is rich. That’s what he says. He has written a success story with his company. He says that too. So you might think that Fuchs, at 61 years old, would take things easier. In fact, he says, he has sleepless nights – because things aren’t moving fast enough for him in the company. Over there, for example, in the building diagonally across the courtyard, nothing has happened for months: rented in the summer, now still empty. New offices and laboratories should have been built there long ago. “That can’t be true,” he says. For someone who wants to send rockets into space soon, this cannot continue.
Fuchs is the boss and majority owner of the Bremen space company OHB. His parents built the company from nothing, and he himself turned it into a listed company with a turnover of around 1 billion euros, for which over 3,000 people work. When you think of space travel, you think of Airbus, Boeing or SpaceX. OHB, on the other hand, is a household name, even though the family business is one of the big players. And if Fuchs can’t sleep, then of course it’s about more than just a hall at the company’s headquarters in the Horn-Lehe district. For the entrepreneur, the empty building is a symptom that the store has become sluggish: “There’s a mildew that comes with size,” he says. Fuchs wants the dynamism of the early years back. That’s why he’s now putting on new strings.
Source: Stern
