Maxdata

» see maxdata.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Holger Lampatz founded Maxdata Computer GmbH in Marl, in North Rhine-Westphalia, in 1987. It started selling personal computers in 1990, and it did the thing a lot of European box-builders did in that decade: it sold business machines under its own name and put the consumer products under a second brand so the two markets would not argue with each other. The second brand was Belinea, and it went on notebooks and monitors.

By 1997 the company was majority-owned by Vobis, which was itself wholly owned by Metro AG, so Maxdata spent its best years inside one of the largest retail groups in Germany. It restructured as Maxdata AG in 2003 and listed on the Prime Standard. Revenue in the year of its stock market debut ran to about 1.1 billion euros; by 2007 it was 468.74 million, and the company was in the red.

A restructuring program started in 2006. It did not turn the business around in 2007 and it did not turn it around in the first half of 2008. At the annual general meeting in April 2008, the head of the management board, Thomas Ziegler, was still describing good times ahead and a foundation laid for the future. Two months later, on 25 June 2008, Maxdata filed for insolvency at the local court in Essen, citing drohende Zahlungsunfähigkeit, which is the German legal term for insolvency that has not arrived yet but is coming. About a thousand people worked there. Proceedings formally opened on 1 September.

If you bought a computer in Turkey in those years you bought something assembled locally or imported through a distributor, and Maxdata was neither. It was a brand that made sense at a German electronics counter and almost nowhere else, which is why its collapse was front-page trade news in one country and invisible in most of the others.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the belinea half ~

Belinea is the part people actually remember, because it was the name on the monitor. The split was deliberate and it worked for a long time: Maxdata for the business channel, Belinea for the shelf. It also meant that when the parent company died, the consumer brand had its own value and could be sold separately, which is exactly what happened. Brunen IT Group took Belinea. The Maxdata name went elsewhere.

The buyers disagree depending on which account you read. Wikipedia credits S&T with the Maxdata name; a September 2008 trade announcement puts the rights with Quanmax from 24 September 2008, along with the server and PC business. Both can be true across a few years, since Quanmax and S&T ended up the same corporate lineage, but the two sources do not line up on their face and this page is not going to pretend they do.

~ what the plant was for ~

The piece of Maxdata that explains the whole collapse is the factory at Würselen, near Aachen, run through a subsidiary called Manufacturing and Logistic Services. It could build a million PCs and notebooks a year. The rated capacity also covered fifty thousand servers and six hundred thousand monitors, with twenty thousand square meters of logistics space attached. It dated from the period when Vobis held the majority, and it was sized for a retail group's volume.

Once that volume went away, the plant was a fixed cost with nothing to fill it. Board member Ralf Coenen told manager-magazin.de that contract manufacturing orders from customers outside the Maxdata group were not enough to keep the works running. Around a hundred of the three hundred staff there stayed on to finish what was in the pipeline; the rest moved into a Beschäftigungsgesellschaft, the German transfer company that holds redundant workers, on 1 September 2008. Computerwoche headlined its piece "Maxdata macht langsam die Lichter aus", which is Maxdata slowly turning out the lights, and that is the right tempo for it. The filing was in June and the building emptied over the rest of the year.

S&T set up a new Maxdata Deutschland GmbH in Mendig in 2014 and renamed it S&T Deutschland GmbH two years later. In 2016 it stopped making desktops and notebooks altogether. The name outlived the company by six years and did nothing with the time.

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