Susanne Hanna Ursula Klatten (née Quandt, born 28 April 1962) is a German billionaire heiress, the daughter of Herbert and Johanna Quandt. As of January 2022, her net worth was estimated at US$23.4 billion, and the richest woman in Germany and the 50th richest person in the world according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The majority of Klatten’s wealth is derived from a 21% stake in the common shares of Bayerische Motoren Werke, the Munich-based automaker. She owns a 0.2% stake directly and 20.7% through Susanne Klatten Beteiligungs, according to the company’s 2022 annual report.
Through closely held investment entity Skion, she owns 29% of carbon producer SGL Carbon, according to the 2021 annual report, and 4% of wind turbine developer Nordex, according to a December 2021 filing.
The billionaire also inherited half of chemical company Altana. Through Skion, she acquired all of Altana’s remaining shares between 2008 and 2010 and took the company private. Her ownership of Skion is confirmed in private company filings. The value of Altana is based on its 2021 financials, published on its website, and the average enterprise value-to-sales and price-to-earnings multiples of three publicly traded peers.
She owns 40% of closely held credit card and passport manufacturer Entrust Datacard. The company has revenue of more than $800 million, according to its website, and is valued using the enterprise value-to-Ebitda multiple of one comparable publicly traded company: Cimpress.
The value of her cash investments is based on an analysis of dividends, insider transactions, taxes and market performance.
Biography
Education: IMD International Institute for Business Development, University of Buckingham/The
Susanne is the oldest child of Herbert Quandt and his third wife, Johanna. After graduating from high school in 1981, Klatten worked at advertising agency Young & Rubicam for two years. When her father died in 1982, she inherited stakes in BMW and Altana, a chemical company specializing in plastics and coatings.
Klatten enrolled at the University of Buckingham in England, earning a bachelor’s degree in business administration. She then got an MBA at IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland. She interned at several banks and management consultancies before starting a traineeship at BMW under the name Susanne Kant. During her time at BMW, she met engineer Jan Klatten; who she married in 1990. The couple have three children and live in Munich.
In 2007, Klatten started an affair with Helg Sgarbi, a Swiss businessman, who swindled her out of about $10 million and threatened to release tapes of the couple having sex if she didn’t pay him $72 million. Sgarbi was sentenced to six years in prison for blackmail in 2009.
Klatten, through her closely held investment vehicle Skion, acquired all of Altana’s remaining shares between 2008 and 2010 and took the company private. The billionaire joined BMW’s supervisory board with her brother, Stefan Quandt, in 1996. She also serves on the boards of Altana, Munich’s Technical University, and a charitable foundation named after her father.
Education
Klatten was born in Bad Homburg, West 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 Business School 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.
She has often worked under the name Susanne Kant.
Investments
On her father’s death she inherited his 50.1% stake in pharmaceutical and chemicals manufacturer Altana. 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. Altana and SKion, which are both wholly owned by Susanne Klatten, are shareholder of Landa Digital Printing with together 46% since 2018. Landa Digital Printing is a company of the Israeli entrepreneur and inventor Benny Landa in the field of digital printing and nanotechnology.
Her father also left her a 12.50% stake in BMW, but following the death of her mother in 2015, her stake in BMW is now 19.2%. She was appointed to the supervisory board of BMW with her brother Stefan Quandt in 1997.
German graphite maker SGL Carbon 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
Quandt family activities during WWII
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 would 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”. 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
Personal life
Police prevented an attempt to kidnap her and her mother Johanna Quandt in 1978.
Susanne met Jan Klatten while she was doing an internship with BMW in Regensburg, where he worked as an engineer. It is reported that during this time, she called herself Kant and did not tell him who she was until they were sure about each other, but Klatten himself denies the story. They married in 1990 in Kitzbühel and live in Munich. They have three children. The couple separated in 2018.[16] She has been a member of the University Council of the Technical University of Munich since 2005. In 2007 she was awarded the Bayerischer Verdienstorden, the Bavarian Order of Merit. She is one of the biggest donors of the centre-right political party, the Christian Democratic Union.
In 2007 Klatten was blackmailed by Helg “Russak” Sgarbi, a 44-year-old Swiss national who threatened to release materials depicting the two having an affair. Sgarbi, who was charged with similar blackmail schemes against multiple women, was arrested in January 2009 and brought to court in Germany, where he was sentenced to six years in jail. His accomplice, the Italian hotel owner Ernano Barretta who allegedly filmed Sgarbi and Klatten with hidden cameras, was also arrested and was sentenced in 2012 to seven years in prison.
Milestones
- 1962 Born to Herbert and Johanna Quandt.
- 1966 Brother Stefan is born.
- 1982 Father Herbert Quandt dies; inherits stakes in BMW and Altana.
- 1989 Works as a management assistant at Hubert Burda Media.
- 1990 Marries Jan Klatten, a BMW engineer.
- 1993 Joins the board of directors at Altana.
- 2014 BMW sells more than two million cars in a year for the first time.
- 2014 Buys Winx office tower in Frankfurt for about 350 million euros.
