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Daimler boss defends name change

"Replacing the traditional name of Benz with the name of the US corporation, which at that time was already sufficiently well-known as a crisis company, was always regarded as arbitrary and in bad style."

Bernd Gan, DaimlerChrysler shareholder

DaimlerChrysler AG Chief Executive Dieter Zetsche reassured shareholders yesterday that the automaker wasn't forgetting part of its history with a proposed name change to Daimler AG -- instead of Daimler-Benz, the company's name for much of the 20th century.

The Benz name will be reserved for the company's flagship luxury brand, Mercedes-Benz, and get plenty of attention, Zetsche said in a statement as shareholders assembled to vote on dropping Chrysler from the name, a formality after selling a majority stake in the US automaker earlier this year.

Zetsche said the company needed to differentiate its product brands from that of the corporate entity and that surveys showed that Mercedes-Benz was "the most coveted automobile brand in Germany."

"The proud name of Benz will not only remain prominent, it will have significantly higher visibility," Zetsche said.

Shareholder Bernd Gans of Vaterstetten, Germany, argues that returning to the original name would right a wrong -- and added a motion to that effect to the agenda of yesterday's meeting.

"Replacing the traditional name of Benz with the name of the US corporation, which at that time was already sufficiently well-known as a crisis company, was always regarded as arbitrary and in bad style," he wrote.

"A return to including the name of one of the founders, Benz, would ... constitute a certain degree of compensation for the many years of frustration for the employees, particularly in the traditional Benz plants, who deserve to find equal recognition in the name of the corporation in the same way as the employees of the Daimler plants," Gans wrote.

Shareholders gathered at Berlin's sprawling ICC conference center, and a vote was expected yesterday afternoon or evening.

Karl Benz (1844-1929) and Gottlieb Daimler (1834-1900) did pioneering work at the dawn of the automobile age in the 1880s but never met.

Daimler, working with partner Wilhelm Maybach, built an internal combustion engine and mounted it on a two-wheeled vehicle in 1885, then installed it on a wheeled coach in 1886, a year after Benz built his vehicle, according to the Gottlieb Daimler-Karl Benz Foundation, now located in Karl Benz's former mansion in Ladenburg near Heidelberg.

The companies founded by the two men were merged in 1926 to form Daimler-Benz AG.

Daimler-Benz AG merged with Chrysler Corp in a US$36 billion deal in 1998, in what then-chief executive Juergen Schrempp called a "marriage made in heaven" as the German company looked for new markets and new opportunities.

But the deal was never popular with German shareholders, who saw the merger as dulling the sheen of one of their country's greatest automakers.

After a decade of up-and-down Chrysler earnings and repeated cost-cutting, DaimlerChrysler AG finally decided earlier this year to shed the US company.

In May, DaimlerChrysler AG's supervisory board gave its final approval to sell 80.1 percent of its stake in Chrysler to the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management LP in a 5.5 billion euro (US$7.81 billion) deal.

Zetsche said in August, however, that Daimler AG plans to hold on to its 19.9 percent stake in Chrysler, and pledged "close cooperation wherever it makes sense."

The German company already changed its share symbol on Frankfurt and New York exchanges in August from DCX to DAI.

But renaming will take through spring next year, including everything from changing 170,000 e-mail addresses to the billboards showing the way to company headquarters in Stuttgart.
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