The Liebherr family gained notoriety through their buildings in South Germany. Hans Liebherr assumed control of his parent’s operations and founded Hans Liebherr Maschinenfabrik in 1949. Along with a team of engineers, he designed and built the world’s first movable crane. Liebherr’s innovation flipped the switch of his company from construction to manufacturing, and he never looked back.
Over the next several decades, Liebherr aggressively expanded not only his company’s operations but also its product lines. Even more impressive is that Liebherr was able to do this while remaining an innovator at the forefront of several machine industries. Liebherr intelligently looked to the future for his children when he decided to divide the company into two parts in 1983, when Liebherr-International AG became the holding company based out of Bulle, Switzerland.
Following his untimely death in 1993, Liebherr’s children, Willi and Isolde Liebherr, took charge of their respective parts of the company. All stocks of Liebherr-International AG remained family-owned during the transfer. Later, the children began another aggressive expansion of Liebherr’s global reach and product development. After two successful decades, they began transitioning leadership to the third generation in 2012. Willi and Isolde still jointly lead the company, along with Jan Liebherr, Stéfanie Wohlfarth, Sophie Albrecht and Patricia Rüf.
