Martina Merz is the Chief Executive Officer of ThyssenKrupp AG, a German multinational conglomerate and one of the largest steel producers in the world. She unexpectedly landed this role by stepping up as an interim replacement after former CEO Guido Kerkhoff was voted out by shareholders. Although an unexpected candidate for the position, she won over her colleagues and is now considered “the most powerful woman in the German economy”—an economy that is the fourth largest in the world.
Merz is trained as an engineer, having received her Bachelor of Science from Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University in Stuttgart. She then embarked on an engineering career that would see her devote over two decades to Bosch, a German multinational technology company. At Bosch, Merz gained extensive management experience across a range of positions, including CEO of subsidiary Robert Bosch Closure Systems GmBH and executive VP of sales and marketing for China and Brazil. Her wealth of management skills with Bosch boosted her reputation and earned her seats on the boards of Brose, Bekaert, and Volvo. Following Bosch, Merz was the CEO of Chassis Brakes International before joining ThyssenKrupp as the company’s CFO.
In her current position, Merz has taken on one of the hardest jobs in German big business. She gave up chairmanship of the company’s supervisory board for a three-year contract as CEO. She is leading a 200-year-old company that was formerly the tenth largest in the world (in 2015) in terms of revenue during a significant period of loss. In 2020, it was reported that the company’s annual loss came in at €5.5bn, resulting in the difficult severance of 5,000 jobs. It was said that the company’s total loss would reach €1bn by the end of the financial year. That said, ThyssenKrupp is still one of the most recognisable names in German industry. Under Merz’s leadership, the company is seeking to win back the confidence of capital markets and “stop the bleeding.”
With the company’s worth reported at $47 billion and employee count still clocking in at over 100,000, Merz has been entrusted with a crucial three-year contract to help steer the German conglomerate into more stable territory. So far, it has been reported that “the changes in the company are clearly visible.”