Founding The company was founded by Rudolf Fuchs on May 30, 1931. It initially traded under the name
Rudolf Fuchs, but was then renamed
Rudolf Fuchs Mineraloelwerke in 1939. The company's Guaranteed Pennsylvania Motor Oil, under the brand Penna Pura, was produced and bottled in the Mannheim slaughterhouse and distributed to transport companies in the
port of Mannheim. In 1937, he acquired a plot of land on Friesenheimer Island, where the new company headquarters were inaugurated in 1939.
World War 2 and the post-war period At the beginning of
World War II, Fuchs lost clients, who had to downsize their vehicle fleets and hand them over to the
Wehrmacht, as well as personnel, as the male employees were drafted into the war. He found new clients in the industry and from then on developed industrial oils.
International expansion In 1968, the first foreign subsidiaries were founded in
France and
Spain. In 1981, Fuchs also entered the
Australian,
Asian and
American markets. In 1985, the company signed a joint venture agreement in
China, which led to the first production facility in
Yingkou in 1988. By then, Fuchs was a group with 80 production and trading companies. In 1984, Fuchs Beteiligungsgesellschaft KG changed its name to
Fuchs Petrolub AG Oel + Chemie. In the same year, Fuchs purchased the British Batoyle Freedom Group company of Norfolk. In 2016, the company initiated its largest
investment program to date. Around 300 million euros were invested in plant expansions and the construction of new production facilities worldwide. Between 2016 and 2018, for example, new grease plants were built in the USA and
South Africa as well as new production facilities in Australia and Sweden. In addition, a new plant for lubricants was opened in
Wujiang, China, and the Asian headquarters and the research and development centre in
Shanghai were expanded and modernized. Most recently, a new
polyurea plant was built in
Kaiserslautern and a new office building at the Mannheim site. Fuchs has also repeatedly taken over smaller, long-standing trading partners (including in
Egypt, Australia,
Finland,
Italy and the USA) and sometimes larger manufacturers, including Statoil Fuel & Retail Lubricants AB (SFR Lubricants) (2015), Deutsche Pentosin-Werke GmbH (2015) and Nye Lubricants Inc. (2021). In 2017, Manfred Fuchs retired from the Supervisory Board; his successor was his daughter Susanne Fuchs. At the Annual General Meeting on May 3, 2023, it was decided to change the name from Fuchs Petrolub SE to
Fuchs SE. == Corporate structure ==