Bauer Media Group

The Bauer Media Group is one of Europe‘s leading media companies. The Bauer family has managed the publishing company since its inception 138 years ago. The executive management transition from one generation to the next has always been carefully planned and prepared. This continuity in corporate management is a unique feature of the family-run Bauer Media Group, and a contributing factor in its stable growth and success.
The beginnings of the company date to 2 January 1875, when lithographer Ludolph Bauer founded a printing house for business cards in the Rothenburgsort district of Hamburg. Bauer’s son Heinrich, a trained printer like his father, became part-owner in 1903. Heinrich Bauer entered the publishing business as a pioneer in Germany with the free advertising paper “Rothenburgsorter Zeitung”.

Heinrich’s son Alfred joined the family company in 1918. In 1923, he moved the printing house from Rothenburgsort to the publisher’s current headquarters in Hamburg’s historic warehouse district. From there Alfred Bauer published a weekly radio programme until publication had to be halted in 1941/42 due to paper rationing during the war. At the end of the war, the publishing house was bombed out. It rebounded in 1946 with the printing of the bestselling wage-tax deduction table “Hamburger Lohnsteuerabzugstabelle”.

Alfred Bauer grew the business over the following two decades together with general manager Siegfried Moenig, with Alfred’s son Heinz Heinrich assuming control of the publishing group in 1958. He continued his father’s expansion course by launching new publications, including iconic TV guide “Hören und Sehen”, and acquiring new magazines to make the company one of the world’s leading magazine publishers.

Since the early 1980s, publisher Heinz Heinrich Bauer has concentrated on the internationalisation of the media group. The foundation for successful expansion into foreign markets was laid with the Group’s entry in the US market.  In the intervening years, the family-run business has become an international media group with 16 locations.

The Bauer Media Group’s attractive media portfolio currently comprises approximately 570 popular magazines, more than 300 digital media outlets, and radio and TV stations in Germany, Australia, Austria, the Czech Republic, France, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Ukraine, the UK, China and the US.

Now in its fifth generation, in November 2010 Heinz Heinrich’s daughter Yvonne assumed the management of the Bauer Media Group after joining the family business in 2005.