is the name of an investment group founded by Dr. Gustav Strupp together with his brothers Meinhold and Louis. Strupp (born 1851) and his brothers had previously inherited the bank house B.M. Strupp (in Meiningen, Thuringia) from their parents, taking over business affairs in 1872. The three brothers had learned their trade well and the small local bank prospered, in 1905 even becoming the official Bank of Thuringia under the name of Bank von Thüringen vormals B.M. Strupp AG.
Strupp himself had a very good eye for opportunities and mainly invested in the German porcelain industry which required enormous amounts of money due to its rapid growth. The idea he followed was simple: as to secure their interests, the Strupp brothers only invested in companies which accepted to leave all vital decisions in the hands of a certain company-size related number of directors and advisors that were supplied and paid by the Strupp-Konzern.
One of the first factories that received funding was the today relatively unknown factory Kloster Veilsdorf (Veilsdorf, Thuringia), in December 1886 followed by the Porzellanfabrik Königszelt (Königszelt, Silesia). Based on the profit from those two companies alone, the investment group expanded in a way that even today can only be described as very impressive; in fact by 1914 the Strupp-Konzern had become the largest investor in German porcelain history.
Around 1924 it became obvious that it could not go on like that forever as the whole group greatly relied on the charismatic but nonetheless aging Strupp brothers and their talent of organization and knowledge of the financial world. Instead of trying to continue and perhaps risk failure, the whole investment group was slowly downsized from 1925 onwards and finally dissolved completely in 1927. Many German porcelain manufacturers known today would never have been able to expand or even continue business if it had not been for the three brothers from Thuringia who for a short time were the wealthiest and most influential people in Germany.
Porcelain- and ceramics-related businesses funded by Strupp between 1918 and 1922 (probably incomplete) :
Admitted, next to the Porzellanfabrik Kahla, the largest porcelain manufacturer world-wide at that time, a few of those names might seem irrelevant. At first glance, that is. For example the Hermsdorf-Schomburg Isolatoren GmbH (better known as Hescho) was the largest producer of porcelain insulators and owner of various international patents (e.g. TriDelta insulator array). Without them, the whole system of overground cables we use today simply would not be the same.
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