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1920px-Continental wordmark

Location: Hannover, Lower Saxony, Germany

Founded: 1871

Key People:

Wolfgang Reitzle (Chairman)

Nikolai Setzer (CEO)

Employees: 202,763

More About The Manufacturer:[]

Continental was founded in 1871 as a rubber manufacturer, Continental-Caoutchouc und Gutta-Percha Compagnie. In 1898, Continental started the development and production of the vehicle tires with plain tread, which was the major success of the brand. In 1904, Continental became the first company in the world to manufacture grooved vehicle tires. Another major product Continental invented was the detachable wheel tire that was made for touring vehicles (1905). In the late 1920s, Continental merged with several other major rubber industry companies to form the largest rubber company in Germany “Continental Gummi-Werke AG”. As with many other German companies during World War II, Continental used to labor in their factories in the 1940s at Hannover-Stöcken, Hannover-Limmer, Hannover-Ahlem, and others, all offshoots of the Neuengamme concentration camp.

After acquiring Siemens AG's VDO automotive unit in 2007, Continental was ranked third in global OEM automotive parts sales in 2012 according to a study sponsored by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

In 2008, Continental appeared overextended with its integration of VDO and had since lost almost half of its market capitalization when it found itself to be the takeover target of the family-owned Schaeffler AG. By 2009, Schaeffler successfully installed the head of its motor division at the helm of Continental.

On 6 September 2012, Continental returned to the benchmark DAX index of 30 selected German blue-chip stocks after a 45-month absence. Schaeffler AG is the controlling shareholder and currently owns 46% of Continental shares. Today, Continental AG is on several iRacing cars such as the Riley MkXX Daytona Prototype making it quite a well-known racing tire company.

In 2017 Continental signed a partnership to be the Tour de France official tire sponsor till 2027.

On 13 November 2020, it was announced that Nikolai Setzer would take over as CEO following the short-notice resignation of Elmar Degenhart.

In February 2021, Continental announced that it acquired a minority stake in Recogni, a German-U.S. start-up, to advance its autonomous driving technology. The start-up is working on a new chip architecture for object recognition in real time based on artificial intelligence.

In December 2021, as a result of a diplomatic spat between Lithuania and China over Taiwan and human rights China pressured Continental AG to stop doing business with Lithuania.

In February, Continental AG cut around 7,150 positions in its auto unit.

Previous Logos:[]

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