Establishment and growth as an international tube manufacturer
In 1886, the German brothers Reinhard Mannesmann (1856–1922) and Max Mannesmann (1857–1915) received the world's first patent for their invention of a process for rolling seamless steel pipes (Mannesmann process). Between 1887 and 1889 they founded tube mills with several different business partners in Bous, Germany, in Komotau/Bohemia, in Landore/Wales and in their home town Remscheid/Germany.[3] In 1890, due to technical and financial start-up problems, the tube and pipe mills existing on the continent were folded into Deutsch-Österreichische Mannesmannröhren-Werke AG. The new company had its headquarters in Berlin. Reinhard and Max Mannesmann formed the first board of directors but left it in 1893. In that year the company headquarters were moved to Düsseldorf—at that time the center of the German tube and pipe industry. The company was renamed Mannesmannröhren-Werke AG in 1908.
In the following years the company's position in the export business, which was important from the beginning, was consolidated and expanded by the acquisition of the Mannesmann tube mill in Landore, Wales, and by the founding of a Mannesmann tube mill in Dalmine, Italy. Branch offices for storage and direct sales business, sometimes with tube processing workshops and pipeline construction capacities, were set up in cooperation with well-established companies all over the world, especially in South America, Asia, and South Africa. In addition, Mannesmannröhren-Werke took up the production of welded steel pipes, stainless steel pipes and other type of pipes and tubes. The company became the worldwide leading manufacturer of steel tube and pipe[4][5][6]
Expansion into a coal and steel conglomerate
In the first decades of its existence, Mannesmann was a pure manufacturer and therefore highly dependent on third-party deliveries of starting material. To reduce the associated risk, the company started to broaden into a vertically integrated iron and steel group in the first half of the twentieth century. The group had its own ore and coal production, steel manufacturers and processors as well as an integrated trading division. In the 1950s Mannesmann established pipe mills in Brazil, Canada and Turkey[4][5]
Further diversification
In 1955, the group's management holding was renamed Mannesmann AG. The group continued to develop into a highly diversified conglomerate. The corporate sectors engineering and automotive founded in the late 1960s comprised famous companies as e.g. Rexroth, Demag, Dematic, Fichtel & Sachs, VDO, Mannesman Sachs, Boge, Kienzle, Krauss-Maffei, Hartmann & Braun and Tally. Within the Mannesmann Group several of these companies evolved into world market leaders in their respective business sectors.[4][5]
Telecommunications
In 1990, following the liberalization of the German telecommunications market, Mannesmann set up a new business sector and established Germany's first cellular network carrier in private ownership known as D2 Mannesmann. The network company was called Mannesmann Mobilfunk GmbH. It was the main competitor to Germany's incumbent carrier, Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile, also known as D1. Additionally, Mannesmann extended its telecommunications division with integrated services covering mobile and fixed network telephony, Internet, and TeleCommerce with companies in Germany, Italy, UK and Austria[6][7]
Takeover by Vodafone and aftermath
The Europe-wide telecommunication branch of Mannesmann was extraordinarily successful and so in 1999 the Mannesmann Group hatched a plan to spin off the other divisions. Through a stock exchange flotation under the name of Mannesmann Atecs AG, these industrial divisions were to be combined in a separate enterprise that would be one of the largest companies listed in the German stock index DAX. However, before these plans could materialize, a historic takeover battle lasting several months ended with the acquisition of Mannesmann by the British mobile phone company Vodafone in 2000. On 4 February 2000 Mannesmann's supervisory board eventually agreed to a takeover price of €190 billion, which was the largest takeover price ever paid until SpaceX acquired xAI for $250B USD in February 2026.[8][9][10] The telecommunications division of Mannesmann was subsequently incorporated into the Vodafone Group.
The other divisions were resold to various companies soon after the deal. The origins of Mannesmann, the pipe production activities of Mannesmannröhren-Werke AG, were sold to Salzgitter AG
