Sixt SE Announces Senior Management Succession Plan

Sixt CEO Erich Sixt will resign from his position on the management board after the annual general meeting on June 16 of this year. Sixt (76) has helmed Sixt for more than 50 years, during which time he led Sixt from a local car rental company to become one of the world’s largest mobility providers with global sales of nearly $4 billion.

He will hand the reins to his sons, Alexander and Konstantin Sixt, who have been appointed to succeed him as joint chairmen of the board and co-CEOs on the group management board.

Erich Sixt took over the company in 1969 from his father when it was still a local brand in Munich, Germany. Together with his wife Regine Sixt, he oversaw the opening of Sixt offices in major German airports in the Seventies. By the end of the Nineties, Sixt had opened over a thousand locations around Europe with corporate and franchised locations. Sixt opened its first branch in the U.S. in 2011. Since then, Sixt has grown to the fourth largest U.S. car rental company in North America.

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Sixt has more than 250,000 vehicles in its fleet globally and 8,500 employees in Germany and abroad. From 2009 until the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sixt doubled its sales from close to $2 billion to $4 billion. The company has locations in 110 countries worldwide.

Erich Sixt is expecting approval to join the supervisory board of Sixt SE as chairman. Alexander (41) and Konstantin Sixt (38) joined the group in 2009 and 2005, respectively, and were appointed to the management board in 2015.

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Alexander Sixt is currently responsible group strategy/mergers & acquisitions, Sixt Tech, purchasing, and human resources.

Alexander built up the DriveNow carsharing joint venture with BMW into a profitable carsharing joint venture that was valued at $500 million when Sixt sold its shares. Alexander was also responsible for the restructuring of Sixt Leasing SE in 2010, which spun off in an IPO in 2015. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 he took over the management of the group’s crisis and cost management program.

Konstantin Sixt has been Sixt’s chief sales officer since 2015, overseeing operating sales revenues of the mobility division grow by 64% since 2015.

Konstantin and Alexander Sixt today also run the Sixt Tech division, which bundles the company’s digitalization initiatives. This includes the global mobility platform Sixt One, a global, integrated platform for car rental, carsharing, subscriptions, and cab and ride services available through the Sixt app.  

“Over the past few years, Alexander and Konstantin have shown through their hard work, energy and passion as well as their impressive successes that they are prepared — even in economically challenging times — to fight for this company and to lead it successfully into the future,” said Erich Sixt in a statement. “I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to my wife Regine, to my colleagues on the Management Board, and above all to the entire Sixt workforce around the globe for their joint efforts in recent years.”

“Alexander and Konstantin Sixt have impressively demonstrated more than once in recent years that they are ideally suited and qualified for this task,” said Friedrich Joussen, chairman of the supervisory board of Sixt SE in a statement.

 “I have always considered the most important task of my office as Chairman of the Supervisory Board to accompany the succession of Erich Sixt,” Joussen continued, adding that he will step down from the supervisory board at the end of this year at the company’s annual general meeting. “I would like to thank Erich Sixt for his many years of trusting cooperation. It has been a great pleasure for all of us to work with such an outstanding and charismatic entrepreneurial personality.” 

“We would like to express our sincere thanks for the trust placed in us. We are facing up to this challenge with a great sense of joy and determination, but also with deep humility, gratitude, and respect for the life’s work of our father Erich Sixt and our mother Regine Sixt, as well as for our responsibility to our employees,” said Alexander and Konstantin Sixt in the statement.