The story
The history of the company goes back to 1858, when in Peine the Ilseder Hütte started. The company was incorporated with other firms in 1937 into the Reichswerke Hermann Göring,
which went on to become the largest German industrial enterprise in the Third Reich
along with I.G. Farben and Vereinigte Stahlwerke AG. The Reichswerke were liquidated in 1953. Its legal successor became the state owned AG für Bergbau- und Hüttenbetrieb, renamed Salzgitter AG in 1961. During the 1960s, the company was the largest state-owned corporation in the world. It went public on the German Stock Exchange in 1998.
In 1970, Salzgitter AG merged with the mining company Ilseder Hütte, which was founded in 1858 in the Hanover area in Germany to manufacture pig iron from the ore discovered in the area between Hanover and Magdeburg. The initial shareholders of Ilseder Hütte were primarily local landowners and merchants. In the 1920s the company was involved in coal mining in Westphalia to safeguard the supplies of coal required for pig iron manufacturing. The company grew through a number or mergers and acquisitions, but was hit by the economic crisis of the 1970s and became state owned through the merger with Salzgitter AG.
In 2007, Salzgitter bought Kloeckner-Werke with its filling and packaging business KHS, as part of its strategy to enter into new industrial sectors. One year later Salzgitter took over SIG Beverages from the Switzerland-based SIG packaging group, expanding its share of the plastic bottle market. This deal included the SIG subsidiaries Corpoplast, Asbofill, Plasmax and Moldtec. Salzgitter planned to commercialise the Plasmax technology to improve the barrier properties of PET bottles.
In December 2008 Salzgitter AG moved up from the MDAX index to the DAX index of top 30 German companies. It was demoted back to the MDAX in June 2010. Since 2019, Salzgitter AG is part of the small-cap SDAX index.
From Wikipedia’s article on Salzgitter AG, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5