DaimlerChrysler AG Chief Executive Dieter Zetsche reassured shareholders Thursday that the automaker was not forgetting 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 would remain in the company's flagship luxury brand, Mercedes-Benz, and get plenty of attention, Zetsche told 4,700 shareholders before a vote on dropping Chrysler from the name, a formality after selling a majority stake in the U.S. automaker earlier this year.
Zetsche said the company needed to clearly differentiate its individual product brands from that of the corporate entity, and that surveys showed that Mercedes-Benz was “the most coveted automobile brand in Germany.”
“Rest assured we will treat both it and our other brands with the greatest respect,” Zetsche said. “And that's why we want to clearly distinguish between our group brand on the one hand and our product brands on the other.”
The Benz name will get added visibility as the company's Mercedes Car Group, which makes the luxury brand and the Smart compact, is renamed Mercedes-Benz Cars, he said.
Shareholder Bernd Gans of Vaterstetten, Germany, argued that returning to the original name would right a wrong — and added a motion to that effect to the agenda.
“Replacing the traditional name of Benz with the name of the U.S. 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.
Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler did pioneering work at the dawn of the automobile age in the 1880s but never met.
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 $36 billion deal in 1998 as the German company looked for new markets and new opportunities.
But the deal was never popular with German shareholders.
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 $7.81 billion deal.
