3 ms·

I'm sorry not a native speaker - I mean the GmbH is owned by the state of Germany.

• majewsky 8y ago
  It's an AG (a stock company), not a GmbH (a limited company). But yeah, all the stocks are still owned by the federal government, and therefore all profits get credited into the federal budget.
  • bogomipz 8y ago
    This is interesting. I am curious what is the upside to a stock company if all the shares are owned by the same entity(the government)? Are there some classes of the DB stack that are allowed to be publicly traded then?
    • nisa 8y ago
      The original plan was to somehow make the whole thing profitable and publicy trade a large partion of shares - so they bought a lot of companies and hoped that they can refinance the train operations. Turn's out it's not so easy...it was just typical management failure, neoliberal politics and pipedreams - so they stopped it in 2005 - Hartmut Mehdorn the CEO at the time is now infamous for basically destroying everything he touches. It's still not a government entity so they don't need to be that transparent and have more leeway to keep wages down.
      • bogomipz 8y ago
        Very interesting, thanks for the detailed information. I will need to read up more on this. It sounds like a good case study. Cheers.