Saedur-Krupp Corporation

 Profile:

Home Office Location: Essen, Germany

President/CEO: Lofwyr (Great Dragon)

Chairman: Lofwyr

Corporation Status: Private Corporation

Major Shareholders: Unknown

The world's largest corp. a German conglomerate based on the production of steel, heavy-industrial goods, cars (BMW), arms and communication in Europe. Its majority shareholder and chairman is Lofwyr, a Great Dragon, who bought the company stocks from hoarded resources.

Primary Business
Saeder-Krupp is the largest corporation in the world involved primarily in industry and heavy assembly, as well as resource-based operations. In the last century, many "green" philosophers predicted that the growth of the information age meant the end of resource exploitation. Antecedents of these philosophers predicted the same things in the mid 2020's, and again in the late 2040's. Saeder-Krupp's continuing success has proved them wrong on all counts.

Corporate Structure
Though Lofwyr controls just about every facet of Saeder-Krupp's corporate operations nowadays, the real mover-and-shaker behind the emergence of Saeder-Krupp was Michel Beloit, a young senior exec with BMW. Predicting some of the chaos that later occurred in Europe, Beloit ousted BMW's conservative management team in a palace coup of epic proportions. Once in control, he struggled to position BMW for growth in the challenging times ahead.

Beloit had either the devil's own luck or unbelievable competence. By 2010 or thereabouts, he had expanded BMW and made it Europe's premier industrial power. With a few well-selected mergers, Beloit developed BMW into a mighty corporate empire. Finding BMW's association with automobiles too restrictive a market, he restructured the megacorp around Saeder Munitions and Krupp Manufacturing to form Saeder-Krupp. He then spun off a leaner, meaner BMW as a wholly-owned subsidiary that could keep covering the market for automobiles and associated technology. In 2032, Beloit kicked the bucket. His wife, the glamorous and rapacious Wilhelmina Graff-Beloit, took over and ran the megacorp for five years.

Around 2037 or so, the great dragon Lofwyr appeared on the scene. Though Mina Graff-Beloit controlled the board and owned billions worth of Saeder-Krupp stock, she didn't hold anywhere near a majority of votes. She believed that no one else did, either. Behind the scenes, however, Lofwyr had spent years buying up Saeder-Krupp shares. When he emerged into the limelight, he announced that he owned a staggering 63 percent of Saeder-Krupp's outstanding shares. He immediately used them to vote himself into the chairmanship of the board, ousting Graff-Beloit and banishing her to the Zurich-Orbital. In his next step, he named himself the megacorp's president/CEO.

Following his assumption of all major offices, Lofwyr pulled off a management buy-out, through which he snapped up all remaining outstanding shares of the company. In 2040, hints emerged that Lofwyr had given or sold some shares to other individules. Nobody knows for sure who he passed them off to, or why. To this day, no one knows exactly who (or what) owns what percentage of Saeder-Krupp.

Major Divisions
Saeder-Krupp has multiple divisions made along arbitrary lines. Some divisions are based on region, some on function, and some using obscure criteria. For example, the Saeder-Krupp Prime division is cased in the same Berlin complex as the megacorp HQ, under Lofwyr's direct control. It has regional and functional subdivisions, and seems to conduct exactly the same range of activities as the parent megacorporation. Apparently, no reason exists for S-K Prime to exist separately from the central corp.

To illustrate how confusing this corporate structure can get, consider the two major Saeder-Krupp operations based in Seattle: S-K Northwest and S-K Aerospace. Despite their location in the same region, both subdivisions belong to seperate branches of the megacorp's organizational chart and have completely distinct chains of command that link them with other divisions up the line.

In most corps, executive know how much autonomy they enjoy. They either run their divisions as independent entities or plan their operations around gaining HQ approval for every course of action. Lofwyr's Saeder-Krupp works differently. From one week to another, the same divisional manager might find himself calling all the shots, or find Lofwyr looking over his shoulder and micromanaging every facet of the business. Becaues of Lofwyr's degree of control, differing executives at different divisions have little input into corporate policy or actions. For this reason, this profile does not include Saeder-Krupp exec VPs.