Retirement at 67? With Paul Gauselmann you would rather say: retirement after 67 – that is, after 67 years at the helm of his own company. But now it’s over as head of the Merkur gaming company.
Gambling pioneer Paul Gauselmann is retiring after 67 years as an entrepreneur. The now 90-year-old “automaton king” will resign from his position as CEO of the Merkur Group on October 1st and thus withdraw from the top management of the group, the company in Espelkamp (North Rhine-Westphalia) announced.
“It has been a concern of mine for a long time to reorganize the situation by the age of 90 at the latest,” Gauselmann is quoted as saying. “We managed that very well and are optimally positioned for the future.” The group with the smiling sun as its logo operated as Gauselmann AG for decades, and has been called Merkur.com AG since the beginning of 2024.
According to its own information, the company had a total turnover of around four billion euros last year, it has 15,000 employees and produces around 50,000 slot machines per year. It also operates almost 800 arcades in Europe, around half of them in Germany. The company also has 15 casinos in its portfolio. There are also three casinos on cruise ships and the business of developing gaming software.
Part-time job as a vending machine operator
Gauselmann laid the foundation for the company in 1957, when he was still employed by a company and started setting up jukeboxes in restaurants as a part-time self-employed person. He later turned to the gambling business. The US magazine Forbes estimates the fortune of Gauselmann and his family at 2.6 billion US dollars (2.3 billion euros). He has had a busy life: in 2019, on his 85th birthday, he told the dpa that he used to work 80 hours a week. Now there are only 40 left. “Work is 50 percent hobby and 50 percent duty.”
Chairman of the supervisory board quits at 89
He always used his energy for the good of the company and therefore for the good of the workforce, says Gauselmann. “Now it’s time to place my life’s work in younger hands.” His successor as CEO will be the previous CFO Lars Felderhoff, who is 48 years old. Gauselmann’s son Michael (68) takes over the chairmanship of the supervisory board from Manfred Grünewald, who at 89 is almost as old as the outgoing company director Gauselmann senior.
Michael Gauselmann has also been working for the company for decades; he drove the company’s internationalization forward: in 1993, the German family business founded a US subsidiary, which a few years later became the first European company to receive a vending machine sales license for the US state of Nevada, where the gambling hotbed of Las Vegas is located. The US company was sold in 2008.
Source: Stern
