German Chancellor Angela Merkel gave the ceremonial address at the gala event held to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the founding of the Carl Zeiss Foundation and praised both the Foundation and its companies.
The Carl Zeiss Foundation celebrates its anniversary in 2014 together with its companies ZEISS and SCHOTT The foundation has provided 80 million euros in funding support for the sciences since 2007
The German physicist and entrepreneur Ernst Abbe founded the Carl Zeiss Foundation in Jena 125 years ago. In doing so, he created a company model for the globally active optics and specialty glass companies ZEISS and SCHOTT that is still unique today. By establishing the Foundation, Abbe pursued his goal of continuing to run the companies ZEISS and SCHOTT independently of the personal interests of their respective shareholders in the future, assuming special responsibility for their employees and using the companies’ profits for charitable purposes, primarily to promote the sciences. The Carl Zeiss Foundation and its two companies wrote German industrial and social history by adopting this unique company model. ZEISS is a leading international company in the fields of optics and optoelectronics, while SCHOTT, a company that manufactures specialty glass products, is a global leader for many of the products it offers.
The German Chancellor Dr. Angela Merkel praised both the Foundation and its companies in her ceremonial speech to the gala event held to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the founding of the Carl Zeiss Foundation. She noted that the Foundation Statute written by Ernst Abbe back in 1896 describes “the ideal model of responsible entrepreneurship.” Because his ideas flowed into social legislation later on, the Foundation Statute can be considered “an outstanding document of German economic and social history” she added. In reference to the companies, she said: “ZEISS and SCHOTT are known all over the world for their state-of-the-art technology ‘made in Germany.’ They are flagships of German business.” And due to their special company model, she also called them “exporters of the social market economy.”