Theo Albrecht, the secretive co-founder of Germany’s worldwide discount supermarket chain Aldi, a co-owner of Trader Joe’s in the US and one of Europe’s richest men, has died at age 88.
The retail empire he built with his brother Karl won over German consumers with their no-frills, super-cheap offers, making billionaires of the pair and spawning imitation “hard-discount” stores across Europe.
The company’s Aldi Nord division said in a statement yesterday that Mr Albrecht was the driving force behind Aldi’s internationalisation, expanding stores to France, Spain, Portugal, Poland and the United States, among other nations.
The company said he died on Saturday in his home city of Essen, but gave no cause of death.
Even that statement marked unusual openness for a company known for its extreme secrecy.
When Forbes featured the brothers in 1992 as two of the world’s richest men, the magazine had to use silhouettes rather than photographs to illustrate the article since no pictures of them had been published in many years.
The German Retail Federation said the country had lost one of its greatest entrepreneurs.
“There are only a few people who have stamped their mark on an entire business sector of the economy. Theo Albrecht achieved just that,” the federation’s managing director, Stefan Genth, said in a statement.
Mr Albrecht and his elder brother both served as German soldiers in the World War II before returning home to Essen and taking over a grocery store their parents owned.
They flourished as the German economy, in shambles after the war, came back to life in what is often called the “economic miracle”.
By 1950, they were already running 13 stores and five years later they had expanded throughout Germany’s western industrial Ruhr basin.
The first Aldi stores – an acronym standing for “Albrecht Discount” – opened in the early 1960s under the motto: “Concentrating on the basics: a limited selection of goods for daily needs.”
Aldi now has more than 4,000 outlets in Germany alone, where it is known for its no-frills shopping environment, streamlined processes and a limited range of discount products.
In the 1960s the brothers decided to divide up what was then West Germany, with Theo running stores in the north. However, they used their combined bargaining power to lower purchasing prices, enabling them to garner higher profit margins while keeping prices low.
As their concept proved successful, Aldi started to expand around the world. In the US alone, the company says it now has about 1,000 shops.
Aldi does not publish sales or profit figures. Aldi Nord says it employs more than 50,000 people around the world but will not reveal how many stores the company has worldwide.
Forbes magazine’s 2010 list of the world’s richest people estimated Theo Albrecht’s fortune at $16.7 billion, making him one of the wealthiest people in Europe. Karl Albrecht, 90, is said to have an estimated wealth of $23.5 billion, making him number 10 worldwide.
Mr Albrecht is survived by his wife Cilli and his two sons, Theo and Berthold. German media said he was buried today in a small family ceremony.