A charity owns almost all of Bosch but gets no say in running it
Bosch, the world's largest car-parts supplier, is 94 percent owned by a charitable foundation. Yet that foundation holds no voting rights over the company and spends its income on health and social causes that have nothing to do with spark plugs or power drills. The unusual arrangement keeps the business private and under its own direction.
Robert Bosch opened his Workshop for Precision Mechanics and Electrical Engineering in Stuttgart on 15 November 1886, at a time when the city had no public electricity supply, which nearly drove him bankrupt until a power station was announced in 1893. His break came with cars. From 1897 the company fitted magneto ignition systems to automobiles, and in 1902 chief engineer Gottlob Honold unveiled a high-voltage magneto with a spark plug. The workforce jumped from 45 in 1901 to more than 1,000 by 1908, and in 1906, the year it built its 100,000th magneto, Bosch introduced the eight-hour day.
Before the First World War, 92 percent of sales came from outside Germany, with factories in Paris from 1905 and Springfield, Massachusetts, from 1912. The war stripped away most foreign holdings, and the firm rebuilt through the 1920s, adding electric horns, windscreen wipers and a diesel injection pump whose development Robert Bosch led himself. Its record in the Nazi era is dark: it secretly built armament factories in cooperation with the regime and used as many as 20,000 forced labourers in wartime production.
After 1945 its foreign assets were seized again and most workers lost their jobs, but West Germany's boom revived it. A downturn in 1966 pushed management toward decentralisation and early research into integrated circuits, electronic fuel injection and anti-lock brakes. Remarkably, the company recorded no operating loss at all during the Cold War era. After the Iron Curtain fell it spread across Eastern Europe, and while 49 percent of sales came from within Germany in 1990, by 2000, 72 percent came from abroad.
Today Bosch works across mobility, consumer goods such as appliances and power tools, industrial technology, and energy and building systems. In 2003 it brought out a cordless screwdriver with a lithium-ion battery, and by 2009 it was spending about 3.6 billion euros a year on research. Its heavy reliance on the car industry means auto slumps hit hard, as a 2025 profit drop showed.
Source: Bosch (company)
