Karstadt
Karstadt Warenhaus GmbH was a German department store chain whose headquarters were in Essen.
Until 30 September 2010 the company was a subsidiary of Arcandor AG and was responsible within the group for the business segment of over-the-counter retail.
On 9 June 2009 Essen District Court ordered provisional asset administration and protective measures in response to an application for the opening of insolvency proceedings. It also appointed a provisional insolvency administrator. The insolvency proceedings were opened on 1 September 2009. On 7 June 2010 the board of creditors resolved to sell Karstadt Warenhaus GmbH to the investor Nicolas Berggruen. Berggruen had taken over all Karstadt stores by 1 October 2010. This had been determined by Essen District Court on 3 September 2010. On 14 August 2014 it was announced that Karstadt had been completely taken over by Signa Holding of the Austrian investor René Benko, which already owned the majority of the sports shops and premium stores.
Karstadt Warenhaus GmbH consisted of 83 department stores, 4 bargain centres, 2 branches of K Town and the online shop karstadt.de. The 28 sports shops belonged to Karstadt Sports GmbH. The company used to own three premium stores - Oberpollinger in Munich, Alsterhaus in Hamburg and Kaufhaus des Westens in Berlin which, with a sales area of 60,000 square metres, is both the largest German and second largest European department store. They now belong to The KaDeWe Group, in which Karstadt's owner Signa Holding has a 49% minority shareholding.
On 25 March 2019 Karstadt & Galeria Kaufhof launched their merged company, Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof, based in Essen, with a new logo and a new website galeria.de. HBC CEO Helena Foulkes said the two companies were excited to bring together two "iconic banners to create Germany's leading retail business."
History
On 14 May 1881 Rudolph Karstadt opened his first store in Wismar under the name "Tuch-, Manufactur- und Confectionsgeschäft Karstadt". Karstadt's strategy of offering fixed low prices in place of the still normal haggling was successful from the start as a result of which he had soon opened branches in 24 towns across Northern Germany. The second Karstadt store opened in Lübeck in 1884. The first customers included Thomas Mann and his brother Heinrich. Further branches opened in Neumünster, Braunschweig, Kiel, Mölln, Eutin and Preetz. In 1900 Rudolph Karstadt took over 13 stores from his highly indebted brother Ernst Karstadt in Anklam, Dömitz, Friedland, Greifswald, Güstrow, Hamburg, Ludwigslust, Neubrandenburg, Schwerin, Stavenhagen, Wandsbek and Waren. Further branches opened in Bremen, Hamburg-Eimsbüttel, Altona, Hanover and Wilhelmshaven. An early highpoint was the opening in 1912 of the branch in Hamburg's Mönckebergstraße which, with a sales area of around, was the first such department store in a major German city. Karstadt also moved increasingly into the in-house production of clothing, opening a large material store in Berlin in 1911 and a clothing factory in the following year. In addition to this, a factory for the production of men's clothing was opened in Stettin in 1919.In 1920 Karstadt took over the company Althoff from Theodor Althoff of Dülmen and transformed the entire group into a limited company. This meant that the Karstadt Group was now also represented by the Althoff stores in Dülmen, Rheine, Borghorst, Bottrop, Bocholt, Recklinghausen, Essen, Münster, Duisburg, Gladbeck, Lippstadt, Coesfeld, Remscheid, Dortmund and Leipzig. It was only much later however that the Althoff stores were given the Karstadt name. The branch network had now expanded to 44 and this number grew further to 89 by 1931. After the First World War, Karstadt expanded rapidly and in July 1926 it established the EPA-Einheitspreis-Aktiengesellschaft with which it created a network of low price department stores. By 1932 there were 52 EPA stores. In addition to this, Karstadt acquired further production facilities in order to reduce further its dependency upon suppliers. These facilities included weaving mills, furnishers, printers and abattoirs.
In 1929 one of the then-largest department stores in the world was opened on Hermannplatz in Berlin-Kreuzberg. The nine-storey building with around of usable space (at that time KaDeWe had less than initially offered work to 4,000 employees. The monumental building also had two towers, a roof terrace and several truck lifts as well as its own entrance from the underground railway. It soon became clear, however, that the building was over-dimensioned and, in 1932, a number of floors were empty due to the economic crisis. In 1945 the building was blown up by members of the SS.
In 1932 Rudolph Karstadt stepped down from the management of the company following the dramatic decline in sales which accompanied the global economic crisis. A restructuring plan included a reduction in the share capital and the closure of numerous branches and production facilities; Epa AG was sold.
In the 1930s the company suffered under the ideological reservations about department stores held by National Socialism. Such stores were generally perceived as a "Jewish invention" and were subject to widespread repression. Karstadt AG had to dismiss 830 Jewish employees, including four board members and 47 branch managers.
After the Second World War
After the Second World War, the stores to the east of the Oder and the Neiße, in Königsberg, Cranz, Neustettin, Stettin and Guben were expropriated – as were those in the Soviet Occupation Zone. More than 30 of the remaining 45 stores in the West – including the then "flagships" in Berlin-Kreuzberg and Hamburg – had been destroyed or severely damaged.The "economic miracle" of the post-war years enabled the company to recover and in the early 1950s it began to expand. A number of takeovers followed, including that of the Grimme department stores in Schleswig-Holstein in 1970.
In 1977 Karstadt acquired a majority share in Neckermann Versand AG and, with an annual turnover of 10.62 billion DM, became the Federal Republic's largest retailer. In the same year, it was decided to close the low-price chain Kepa. In 1984 Neckermann was taken over completely and integrated into the structure of the group.
Following German reunification, former Centrum department stores were taken over in Brandenburg an der Havel, Dresden, Halle, Magdeburg, Wismar and Görlitz. In 1994 Karstadt took over the Hertie department stores. These Hertie department stores initially continued to operate in parallel but they were then progressively transformed into Karstadt stores or closed. The takeover of Hertie also left Karstadt as the owner of a number of properties which the National Socialists had expropriated from the Jewish department store founder Wertheim. In 2005 the Berlin Administrative Court ordered KarstadtQuelle AG to compensate the heirs.
In 1999 Karstadt AG and the mail-order company Quelle merged to form KarstadtQuelle AG.
Karstadt department stores after the merger with Quelle
Following the merger with Quelle, the department stores of the former Karstadt AG were operated by Karstadt Warenhaus GmbH, a fully owned subsidiary of KarstadtQuelle and Arcandor AG.In October 2004 it emerged that Karstadt Warenhaus AG and the entire KarstadtQuelle group were in a dramatic financial situation. Karstadt was facing both the difficulties being faced by the entire retail sector and its own home-made problems. The company was continuing to ignore market trends by offering a wide assortment of goods while critics complained that the interiors were outdated and the goods on offer not customer-orientated.
Since 1 January 2005, the food departments in currently 67 of the 90 Karstadt branches have been run by a Cologne-based joint venture known as Karstadt Feinkost GmbH & Co. KG, of which Karstadt owns 74.9% and the Rewe Group 25.1% and of which each company appoints one managing director. Karstadt contributed goods and properties worth around 50 million euros to the company and Rewe the same amount of new capital. Initially, Karstadt Feinkost had around 3,700 employees, most of whom had come from KarstadtQuelle, and generated an annual turnover of around 500 million euros. Until 2007 the joint venture reported annual pre-tax losses in the tens of millions. Ever since the founding of Karstadt Feinkost the departments have been gradually refurbished and repositioned with a modified product range under the new brand Perfetto.
The ongoing crisis situation led in August 2005 to the sale of 74 Karstadt branches with sales areas below , 51 SinnLeffers clothing stores and the specialist retail chain Runners Point.
The Karstadt department store properties still owned by KarstadtQuelle were sold in 2006 to the Highstreet consortium of which the group itself owned 49% and Whitehall Funds 51%. In 2008 KarstadtQuelle AG sold its 49% share to a consortium including the Borletti Group, the Generali Group, Pirelli RE and RREEF Alternative Investments.
In 2006, in order to mark its 125th anniversary, Karstadt published a celebratory book entitled Schaufenster Karstadt – Einblicke in 125 Jahre, which presented the history of the company.
Karstadt's book departments have been operated since April 2008 as "shops-in-shops" by DBH Warenhaus. In Karstadt's premium stores these book departments operate under the "Hugendubel" name and in all others as Weltbild. Further companies who are Karstadt tenants and operate independently while renting Karstadt's checkout/payment system include WMF, Rosenthal Porcelain and the drugstore brand Müller. In October 2007 the Handelsblatt reported that Karstadt was considering taking over the Kaufhof department stores from Metro AG, a deal which would have made the company Europe's second-largest department store group after Spain's El Corte Inglés. In 2008 Gravis announced the abandonment of its unprofitable cooperation with Karstadt in two pilot stores in Düsseldorf and Lübeck which had originally been envisaged for all 90 stores. In the same year Karstadt started cooperating with the fashion designers Kaviar & Gauche and Kostas Murkudis.
In May 2009 it was announced that the Metro Group's Kaufhof AG wanted to take over 60 of Karstadt's 90 department stores. In addition to this, liquidity problems meant that the Karstadt parent company Arcandor was no longer able to make rental payments to the Highstreet consortium, the owners of the department store buildings.