Messer has now posted its complete Company Reports for the past 44 years on its Internet website www.messergroup.com. For each year, historian and author Jörg Leszenski has written German informative sketches of the industrial setting which provide a unique and independent view of the company's history.

 

It is only against the background of the overall economic conditions that the special features of Messer's history become clear. Thus, the texts, read in parallel with one another, offer engrossing insights into the strategies adopted by the company to take advantage of its market opportunities since the end of the 1960s in an ever-faster changing world economy, but also into the rash expansion strategies which drove Messer to the brink of ruin in the 1990s. It also reveals the firm wish and attempts by parts of the founder family, finally successful in 2004, to return the whole group into family hands and to run it as an owner-managed enterprise in a globalised economy.

 

The Company Reports archived from 1966 to today and the reports on the economic setting reflect, firstly, the economic cycles, as well as the growing global interdependence of national economies and also the rise of new boom regions which, in the last third of the 20th century, increasingly challenged the development of Messer Griesheim GmbH after its formation in 1965 and which still have a significant influence on the development of the Messer Group today.