Establishment and growth as an international tube manufacturer In 1886, the German brothers (1856–1922) and Max Mannesmann (1857–1915) received the world's first patent for their invention of a process for rolling seamless steel pipes (
Mannesmann process). Between 1887 and 1889 they founded tube mills with several different business partners in
Bous, Germany, in
Komotau/
Bohemia, in
Landore/
Wales and in their home town
Remscheid/Germany. In 1890, due to technical and financial start-up problems, the tube and pipe mills existing on the continent were folded into Deutsch-Österreichische Mannesmannröhren-Werke AG. The new company had its headquarters in
Berlin. Reinhard and Max Mannesmann formed the first
board of directors but left it in 1893. In that year the company headquarters were moved to Düsseldorf—at that time the center of the German tube and pipe industry. The company was renamed Mannesmannröhren-Werke AG in 1908. In the following years the company's position in the export business, which was important from the beginning, was consolidated and expanded by the acquisition of the Mannesmann tube mill in Landore, Wales, and by the founding of a Mannesmann tube mill in
Dalmine, Italy. Branch offices for storage and direct sales business, sometimes with tube processing workshops and pipeline construction capacities, were set up in cooperation with well-established companies all over the world, especially in
South America,
Asia, and
South Africa. In addition, Mannesmannröhren-Werke took up the production of welded steel pipes, stainless steel pipes and other type of pipes and tubes. The company became the worldwide leading manufacturer of steel tube and pipe
Expansion into a coal and steel conglomerate In the first decades of its existence, Mannesmann was a pure manufacturer and therefore highly dependent on third-party deliveries of starting material. To reduce the associated risk, the company started to broaden into a vertically integrated iron and steel group in the first half of the twentieth century. The group had its own ore and coal production, steel manufacturers and processors as well as an integrated trading division. In the 1950s Mannesmann established pipe mills in
Brazil,
Canada and
Turkey Takeover by Vodafone and aftermath The Europe-wide telecommunication branch of Mannesmann was extraordinarily successful and so in 1999 the Mannesmann Group hatched a plan to spin off the other divisions. Through a stock exchange flotation under the name of Mannesmann Atecs AG, these industrial divisions were to be combined in a separate enterprise that would be one of the largest companies listed in the German stock index
DAX. However, before these plans could materialize, a historic takeover battle lasting several months ended with the
acquisition of Mannesmann by the British mobile phone company Vodafone in 2000. On 4 February 2000 Mannesmann's
supervisory board eventually agreed to a takeover price of €190 billion, which was the largest takeover price ever paid until SpaceX acquired xAI for $250B USD in February 2026. The telecommunications division of Mannesmann was subsequently incorporated into the Vodafone Group. The other divisions were resold to various companies soon after the deal. The origins of Mannesmann, the pipe production activities of Mannesmannröhren-Werke AG, were sold to
Salzgitter AG along with the brand name Mannesmann.
Siemens AG bought the majority of
Atecs Mannesmann AG, including automobile components (
VDO Adolf Schindling AG,
Mannesmann Sachs, Boge GmbH), cranes and locomotives (
Mannesman Demag Krauss-Maffei GmbH), logistics (
Mannesmann Dematic AG), and defense (
Krauss-Maffei Wegmann);
Robert Bosch GmbH acquired
Rexroth, an industrial engineering company.
KraussMaffei logos and trademarks are transferred to Krauss-Maffei Kunststofftechnik GmbH, plastics and molding equipment subsidiary that was spun off in 1986. ==Controversies==