Centrotec Sustainable AG

LED Lenser: Part of the Portfolio since 2014... (Some say the only valuable thing Guido ever gave to shareholders)

Most exhibits here are about money that vanished. Centrotec is about money that arrived – to someone else, just after you were shown the door. It is the museum’s monument to the German minority shareholder, that most patient and most disposable of creatures.

Centrotec Sustainable AG was a tidy Mittelstand champion in building climate technology. It began in 1981 as a plastics business in Marsberg in the Sauerland, floated on the Neuer Markt in 1998, spent six years in the SDAX, and acquired along the way its crown jewel Wolf, a maker of heating systems, boilers and – crucially – heat pumps, alongside the ventilation specialist Brink. A boring, cyclical, perfectly decent business, majority-controlled by its founder Guido Krass.

In November 2020, with the stock unloved and the price depressed by the Covid crash, Krass moved to take the company off the exchange – a delisting from the regulated market in Frankfurt. Free-float holders were offered €15.03 a share – precisely the legally required minimum, the six-month average price, at a moment when the shares had been trading at around €18 before the plan was announced. Governance veteran Christian Strenger called the result a de facto expropriation of the minority; the shareholder association DSW asked for the law to be changed.

Commentators (Euro am Sonntag among them) cried foul: the minority was, in the precise German phrase, geschädigt – disadvantaged – and an independent board, they argued, would never have waved through certain related transactions, including the purchase, for about €43 million, of the Swiss holding company Pari Group, which critics described as Krass’s own.

And it was all entirely legal. That is both the genius and the horror of it. No fraud, no missing billions, no perp walk – just a controlling owner using the rulebook exactly as written to retire the public at the cheapest defensible moment, as the shares slipped off the official market on 15 January 2021.

And then – the punchline that makes this an exhibit rather than a footnote – history happened. In 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine, European gas prices went vertical, and Germany set about legislating the gas boiler into retirement, turning the humble heat pump into the most strategically prized appliance on the continent.

Firms that made them became, overnight, darlings of the green transition. Wolf was suddenly sitting on gold – and this time the gold was actually collected. In September 2022, barely twenty months after the delisting, Centrotec agreed to sell its climate business – Wolf, Brink and their sister companies – to the Italian heating group Ariston – the biggest acquisition in Ariston’s history – for €703 million in cash plus 41.4 million new Ariston shares, about 11% of the buyer. Krass took a seat on Ariston’s board. The minority shareholders, cashed out at €15.03 the year before, watched the gold rush from the pavement, no longer invited to the party they had funded for years. There is no chart of their loss, because the loss is invisible: it is the upside that someone else, quite legally, kept.

Shares in the Hamburg open market, where the thinly traded remainder still changes hands, have since traded at more than €60 in 2025 – four times the exit price. Krass, meanwhile, has crept up to an 89% stake. The squeeze-out threshold is in sight, and the museum suspects it will not be priced at the top of the cycle either.

Museum note: a heat pump moves warmth from where it is cheap to where it is valuable. Centrotec, it turns out, was the perfect advertisement for its own product.

Further reading

• Wikipedia (German) – Centrotec (ongoing)
• Börse Online – Rocket Internet und Centrotec: Börsenrückzug erzürnt Aktionäre (2020)
• Ariston Group – Press release on the acquisition of Centrotec Climate Systems (2022)
• Cooling Post – Ariston completes Centrotec acquisition (2023)
• Homburger – Centrotec’s acquisition of Pari Group (2020)
• Investment Week – Delisting, Dividende, Dynamik: Warum Centrotec-Aktionäre plötzlich aufhorchen (2025)