Christoph Bruns turned the stolid bond house into the fastest-growing money manager in Germany by championing shareholder rights. He also brought it a barrage of criticism. Following his exit, expect a more discreet approach.
By David Lanchner
October 2001
Institutional Investor Magazine
Some resignations cause everyone to breathe a little easier. Christoph Bruns's was like that.
The husky, energetic Bruns is arguably Germany's most successful equity manager. In just seven years he has transformed Frankfurt's Union Investment from a stodgy bond house with a small, poorly performing equity business into the country's fastest-growing money manager. Using U.S.-style quantitative techniques and focusing on stocks with "growth potential at a reasonable price," Bruns caught a large part of the global equity rally and helped push Union's returns toward the top tier of German funds. He and his colleagues created a large and aggressive distribution system to garner retail assets. And Bruns's high-profile crusades for shareholder rights, radical by German standards, generated front-page headlines for Union in European newspapers and made the portfolio manager a star on local personal finance shows. "Activism not only boosts fund performance, it is an effective marketing tool," he says.
As a result of this notoriety and performance, money has poured into Union's coffers. Since Bruns's arrival in late 1994, Union has increased its equity assets more than 18-fold, to E37 billion ($35 billion). Propelled by Bruns's equity portfolios, Union's total assets, which are only 7 percent institutional, have nearly tripled, to E56 billion under management, making it the country's third-largest mutual fund manager behind Deutsche Bank's DWS Investment (E80.8 billion) and Deka Group (E66.4 billion). Seven years ago it stood a lowly fifth and was losing ground. Union now offers 236 domestic and international funds, up from 73 in 1994. In the first five months of this year, Union funds captured an astounding 35 percent of total German retail investment in equity funds.
The remarkable growth, however, has come at a not always reasonable price. The controversial 34-year-old money manager has gone toe-to-toe with some of Germany's most powerful corporate titans - men like Deutsche Telekom's Ron Sommer, Volkswagen's Ferdinand Piech and Preussag's Michael Frenzel. Bruns embraced bare-knuckle tactics, publicly castigating (which Union calls "naming and shaming") poorly performing companies, voting against management proposals at annual general meetings and pushing for the ouster of certain chief executives. This approach agitated not only his targets but a wide swath of German companies and financial institutions. Chief among them: Union's major shareholders, Deutsche Genossenschaftsbank and Genossenschafts Zentralbank, the investment banking arms of Germany's 1,794 cooperative banks, many of which lend money to the same corporations Bruns attacks. Increasingly, these shareholders have been imposing tighter controls on Union and pressuring the firm's three-member executive board, made up of chief executive Manfred Mathes, chief investment officer RÙdiger Ginsberg and Wolfgang Mansfield, head of back-office operations, to rein in Bruns and his colleagues.
As it turns out, they won't need to. In mid-July Bruns announced he will leave Union at year-end so that he and his expectant wife can move to her hometown, Chicago, where he plans to take a six-month paternity leave before looking for a new job in money management. His departure will no doubt spare his bosses a potentially messy conflict. Despite his success at pulling in assets, Bruns was putting the board in an uncomfortable position. "On a regular basis Union's executive board gets phone calls from DG Bank and GZ Bank, and from the chief executives of the companies [Union] criticizes, and it makes them very nervous," says a senior cooperative banking executive who knows the principals at Union well. Put more bluntly by the CEO of a rival asset management firm, "Germany is not ready for guys as aggressive as Bruns."
But Bruns's exit also raises questions about Union's future course. Can the firm continue its incredible asset growth without its marquee portfolio manager? Will it change an outspoken style that definitely moved product but that rankled even some fellow shareholder rights activists who felt it was more hype than substance?
The answer to the latter question appears to be yes (the former won't be answered for another year or more). Bruns's immediate boss, Ginsberg, who joined Union's board in 1998 and will decide on his successor, leaves little doubt that he hopes a kinder, gentler Union will emerge after year-end. He would like to see an end to the practice of "naming and shaming," introduced by Bruns and communications and corporate governance head Rolf Drees. Recently, the net of criticism has widened to include European companies outside Germany, such as Dutch telecommunications concern KPN and Spanish utility Endesa. "I hope there is no list next year," says Ginsberg, "but if there are companies where we must address issues of corporate governance, we will. I can't say definitely whether or not we will publicize the names of companies."
Another Bruns innovation, voting Union shares against management proposals at AGMs, is also likely to be used less frequently. "I don't like a vote where we can only say what we don't like," says Ginsberg. "If management gets a majority, then we have not changed the situation. I don't rule out that it might happen here and there, but it should not happen too often. It is more important to intensively discuss changes in private with management."
Ginsberg insists that he and the rest of Union's board would have liked Bruns to stay and says the firm will continue to push for change at German corporations. But he doesn't mention a commitment to shareholder activism as a major job qualification for aspiring successors. Instead, he emphasizes a stellar performance record and the ability to manage a team.
Senior executives at DG Bank and GZ Bank, who have at times criticized Bruns's methods, will be watching the selection process closely. DG and GZ, which are wholly owned by the cooperative banks and operate as their investment banking arms, own 47 percent and 28.8 percent, respectively, of Union. (Other shareholders include a regional cooperative, Westdeutsche Genossenschafts-Zentralbank, which owns 17.5 percent, and Holland's Rabobank Group, with 5 percent. A variety of other German cooperatives own the remaining 1.7 percent.) Just a month after Bruns's resignation announcement, DG and GZ had their own news: They would merge to create a new entity, DZ Bank, effective September 18. Combined, the two hold three quarters of Union's shares and have virtually complete control of the feisty money manager.
Even without critical shareholders looking over his shoulder, Ginsberg would have a tough choice to make. Germany doesn't have a long list of money managers who combine a top-notch investment record with a public profile that inspires investor confidence. Because commercial and investment banks, major companies, insurers and asset managers own major chunks of each other, they have traditionally influenced one another behind the scenes rather than by publicly announcing their positions.
And it's improbable that Ginsberg will find anyone with the unique skills and passions of Bruns, a MÙnster-born Ph.D. in finance who speaks English with a Chicago accent and bounds around the halls of Union's 17-story tower like a frenetic bear. "It is very likely that Union will become less activist after Bruns leaves," says a senior Union executive. "Who in the organization will have the stature to go up against Germany's corporations? There is no one I can think of." Now that the asset manager's two major shareholders have united, "pressure will only rise," the executive adds, to find a less outspoken replacement for the gadfly with the big marketing buzz.
Union and Bruns were an odd pairing from the start. Founded in 1956 by 14 private banks that wanted to combine their investment management operations, Union is today indirectly owned (through DG, GZ and the others) by Germany's cooperative banking association, based in Berlin. The cooperative was set up with utopian ideals in 1876 by Friederich Wilhelm Raiffeisen, the social reformer and critic of capitalism. Raiffeisen believed that hard-pressed farmers, artisans and other workers, largely ignored by the banking system, could pool their savings to make loans available to one other. Given their brief, the cooperative banks were much more interested in providing loans to middle-class borrowers than in producing huge profits and over the next century fell well behind private institutions like Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank and Commerzbank in seizing growth opportunities such as asset management. Increasingly squeezed by declining interest margins and cutthroat competition, however, the cooperative banks have been gradually pushing into money management since the 1960s.
Not surprisingly, the conservatively managed cooperatives were drawn to fixed income rather than equities. In 1994, before Bruns joined its ranks, Union had E21 billion under management, all but about E2 billion of it in bonds. The cooperatives' sheer size - Dm794 billion ($376.3 billion) in deposits, or 16 percent of the total - guaranteed Union a top five spot in German money management. But while it enjoyed a 12 percent market share through the early 1990s, it was the slowest-growing major firm. Meanwhile, DWS was grabbing market share and pushing stock investment.
Mathes, a marketing professional who has been Union's CEO since 1988, realized the enormous potential that Germany's fledgling equity culture held for the firm. He also knew that Union needed a strong leader to build the business.
Enter Bruns, an outspoken academic who began investing in Canadian mining shares as a 16-year-old. He arrived at Union after finishing his Ph.D. at the University of MÙnster. He was quite a catch for an investment firm with a mediocre performance record. Bruns had made a splash in 1993 by publishing the first German book, Wertpapier Management (Securities Management), to explore and explain the modern portfolio theories of U.S. Nobel laureates Harry Markowitz, Merton Miller and William Sharpe. Bruns's timing was flawless. Fixed-income-minded Germany was just beginning to appreciate equities, and derivatives were starting to gain favor in the markets. With its discussion of options theory and risk management techniques, the book "made him a star," says Boris Boehm, a portfolio manager at Norddeutsche Investment Gesellschaft in Hamburg. "Equity investment in Germany was largely driven by gut feeling, but after Bruns's book it became much more quantitative."
"Christoph could have gotten a job in any money management operation, and at least superficially it looked kind of weird to come to Union," says communications chief Drees. "But it really wasn't. If he went to Goldman Sachs or an established equity investment house, he would have just been one among many managers; here he could begin from scratch with all the ingredients for a success story in place."
Union's management board got slightly more than it bargained for, however. "At the time, the priority for the board was to improve performance, but what they did not know was that they hired a person who was wholeheartedly behind the shareholder rights movement as well," says Bruns, for whom shareholder activism complements quantitative research. "When analyzing the risks and potential of particular stocks, my approach is to look at the relevant factors and give them weightings," he says. "The attitude of management is a soft factor, but it is a very important one that also must be weighted."
For Drees, the gregarious Bruns was a godsend. A former stock analyst at Commerzbank, Drees came to Union in 1992 to be its first public relations honcho. Getting low-key Union more mentions in the German press wasn't easy. "This was a bond fund house with only 10 percent [of its assets] in equities and only two equity fund managers," Drees says. "It was like a desert."
With the charismatic Bruns, Drees found a personality that he could turn into a marketing vehicle. Bruns had spent six months as a runner on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in 1991 - it was then that he met his wife - and seems to have absorbed an American's openness. But he's also a true Frankfurter: He loves beer and bratwurst and rides a moped to work. He gamely tries to keep his weight in check by jogging along the Main River and playing tennis, and he is candid about his personal habits - a rarity in Germany. Vigorous exercise and a hearty appetite, he says, "aren't contradictory; they're just two sides of a well-rounded personality."
Bruns spent his first year at Union in charge of UniGlobal, an international stock fund with just Dm120 million under management and a dismal performance history: It ranked 15th out of 17 German global funds with 20-year track records. Previous managers had used a top-down strategy. They looked for promising regional or national markets for investment and only then turned to stock picking. Bruns turned the process on its head. He brought the fund back to a neutral weighting relative to the MSCI world index and then methodically went through every equity holding to adjust positions. In the process, he upped UniGlobal's allocation to German software designer SAP, Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia Corp. and French oil company Total, which proved to be three big winners. The moves paid off. SAP stock rose 147 percent in 1995; partly thanks to that performance, UniGlobal had returned a whopping 64.3 percent within a year. Today the fund has Dm5.7 billion under management and, according to Micropal, which tracks international fund returns, ranks fourth for five-year performance through August among its 33 peers.
Based largely on his UniGlobal success, Bruns was promoted to be Union's head of equities a year later. At 28, he became the youngest person ever to oversee the stock portfolios of a major German fund.
Bruns wasn't just a gifted portfolio manager and quant; he also understood marketing. Together with Drees and marketing director Oliver Bauer, he pushed Union's equity funds aggressively to all of the cooperative banks' 15,696 branches, effectively turning their 171,000 employees into a huge sales network. They commissioned a study, later turned into a marketing brochure, showing that German equities had returned 14.5 percent annually since the introduction of the deutschemark in 1948 and offered discounts to employees who put their own money into a Union equity fund for a year. Although cooperative banks can offer any funds they choose, roughly 80 percent of their sales are Union funds.
With Mathes's blessing, the three promoted Union's investment products on television (with the tag line Werte fÙrs Leben, or Value for Life) for the first time. This year Union will spend more than E20 million on TV ads.
The threesome also started a series of so-called information events aimed at small investors. Featuring free sandwiches and beer, these get-togethers, usually held in a local town hall, championed the virtues of equity investing and helped create demand for Union products. Going out into German towns and villages to sell funds was a big departure for Union. "In the past we only sold people investment products when they asked for them," says Drees. Over the past seven years, Union has held 1,000 of these events.
There was more. Bruns and his colleagues were quick to realize that corporate activism was good business. Although DWS also makes a point of championing shareholder rights, Germany's largest fund manager has never attacked CEOs individually and almost never votes its shares against management. Bruns was prepared to go further.
In 1996 he became the first fund manager to vote publicly against a German corporation. At the AGM of Munich's Bayerische Vereinsbank - which was just about to merge with rival Hypotheken- und Wechsel-Bank - Bruns opposed a management proposal that would have let the bank buy and sell its own shares whenever it chose. Because Germany doesn't have strong insider trading regulations, Bruns believed the bank might be tempted to buy and sell its stock to boost profitability, possibly at the expense of minority shareholders. Union was the only investor to vote against the motion. Nevertheless, over the next year Union voted against management motions at a half dozen other companies, usually with little impact.
Its efforts finally bore fruit last year. In a virtually unprecedented event in Germany, the head of giant department and specialty store chain Karstadt Quelle, Walter Deuss, was forced to resign a year ahead of his scheduled retirement after a blistering two-year attack from Union, which accused management of providing virtually no useful information for investors. Karstadt did no segment or quarterly reporting and never held meetings with analysts. It didn't set profitability targets for product lines or geographic regions. Union repeatedly noted that Karstadt stock had posted a measly average annual return of 4 percent in the 1990s, while the DAX 30 rose 14 percent a year in the same period. The company had failed to sell money-losing operations and insisted on sticking to its line of low-margin merchandise. In fact, the 119-year-old, Essen-based retailer didn't even have an investor relations officer. "They did everything wrong you could think of doing wrong," says Drees. "The overall record of Deuss was below what capital markets can stand."
Finally, Union called for Deuss to resign at Karstadt's July 2000 annual meeting. The move generated front-page stories in much of Germany's financial press. It also triggered complaints about Bruns from DG Bank, where Deuss's son happened to head equity sales. But Bruns and his colleagues have results to show for their audacity. Under new CEO Wolfgang Urban, a former senior executive of German food retailer Metro, Karstadt has completely overhauled its reporting, benchmarked its operations to competitors', sold off unprofitable subsidiaries and bought higher-margin specialty retailers. Profits surged 21 percent in 2000, to E273 million.
Urban, in fact, is one of Union's biggest fans. "Their approach to AGMs is something extraordinary in Germany," he says. "They add value when they speak out, and they were a piece in the mosaic that brought change to Karstadt."
For Bruns and Drees, the retailer's transformation hinted at what shareholder activism could accomplish in Germany. Encouraged, they homed in on an even bigger target this spring: Deutsche Telekom, one of the country's mightiest companies. People familiar with the matter say Union's campaign against DT and its chief executive, Ron Sommer, was nearly the asset manager's undoing. Like many investment banks, DG coveted a spot in the underwriting syndicate for DT's wireless unit,
T-Mobile, according to an executive at one of the cooperative banks. The sale of a 20 percent stake in T-Mobile was expected to be the largest initial public offering in the German market this year, at an eye-popping E23.8 billion. "The investment banks were basically afraid they might suffer in the
T-Mobile allocation at a time when IPOs were few and far between," says the source. (In response to the depressed market for telecom stocks, the offering has since been postponed until next year.)
Bruns and Drees got only reluctant support from Union's board to challenge DT. Union stressed that millions of small German investors had been hurt by the 76 percent decline in the value of the phone company's shares from their peak in April 2000. And Drees argued, according to the cooperative bank source, that "not to go after Deutsche Telekom, or for that matter the other companies" on the name-and-shame list, "would hurt Union's credibility precisely when an increasing number of small German investors, nursing stock market losses, were asking for more activism from their fund managers, not less." At least one senior executive at DG Bank complained to Mathes about the prospective DT campaign, according to the source. (The investment banks deny that they tried to influence Union.) Despite its misgivings, the board, which must approve all activist initiatives at Union, eventually backed Bruns and Drees.
At DT's May 29 annual meeting, Drees lambasted Sommer's $26 billion acquisition of U.S. wireless operator VoiceStream Wireless Corp. and his E8.4 billion outlay for third-generation wireless licenses, saying they were unlikely to provide any meaningful return for the company. He added that "top management must accept that it is responsible for the disappointing share price." Union also voted against a capital increase and a stock option plan for management; it didn't even approve the slate of board members. Sommer reassured shareholders that he was doing everything possible to see that "our company's potential and prospects are realized." The stock market and DT shares, he added, "may now be finding a stable base."
Once again, Drees's criticism generated headlines in both the German and international press, and investors shaved another 2.85 percent off DT's share price in the hours after the meeting began. Speculation started anew that Sommer would be forced to resign. Although Bruns, Drees and DT deny it, Union insiders say the phone giant stopped sending corporate information to Union analysts after the stormy annual meeting.
That may seem tepid retaliation for confronting one of the country's most powerful CEOs, but sources at other German buy-side firms say it likely was only the most tangible indication of DT's displeasure. "This is not the U.S., where Regulation FD prohibits selective disclosure," says the chief executive of one of Germany's largest fund companies. "If we shatter our relationship with Ron Sommer and make him look bad, you can bet he won't forget. If we did what Union did, our analyst would never get tips on the company's outlook - for example, how hard or soft certain sales and earnings targets are. If you don't like a company's prospects, it is better just to sell it quietly."
Bruns and Drees emphatically disagree. "We have to own these companies because they are in our index funds [including Union's E5 billion UniEuroStoxx50 and E1 billion UniDeutschland funds] and in other funds that are closely benchmarked to the indexes," says Drees. Otherwise, he notes, Union could afford to just "cut its losses, keep quiet and sell the stock like most other German fund managers." Adds Bruns: "If we were majority shareholders, we would just kick out the board. What we do is argue publicly. That is our weapon."
Bruns's brand of shareholder activism has always come in for criticism. Banks, corporate targets and even fellow investors all take shots at Bruns and Drees. DWS, which now votes against management occasionally, still refrains from attacking specific managers and doesn't agree with Union's oft-stated thesis that "shareholder value should be the only yardstick used to measure corporate performance." If shareholder returns become the only standard for investors, argues DWS, matters of social, environmental and political importance may get short shrift. Indeed, the No. 1 mutual fund manager is hewing to the traditional German line - that too narrow a focus on profitability can hurt labor, customers and other stakeholders. DWS insists that can "impact a company's well-being."
Some of the big German fund managers charge that Union, and to a lesser extent DWS, is more interested in enhancing its public image than in improving corporate performance. "We are the biggest equity fund managers in Germany," says Gunnars Balodis, chief executive of Frankfurt-based Deka Group. "We don't need to showcase ourselves the way Union and DWS do to establish our reputation as equity fund managers. We find that the most effective way to complain is through one-on-one meetings with management. Doing it in public is just a marketing exercise."
Large companies certainly prefer Balodis's behind-the-scenes approach. Says Peter Szymanski, head of investor relations at tour operator Preussag, one of six companies Union targeted this year: "Union made all their complaints to us in a one-on-one meeting. We took that very seriously and responded to them point by point. When Union repeated their concerns in public at the AGM, we saw that more as an advertising measure for themselves rather than something that was seriously intended to make us change." Union has sharply chastised Szymanski's boss, chief executive Michael Frenzel, for failing to sell off operations in energy and logistics and not focusing more fully on Preussag's core tourism business. The money manager also thinks that Frenzel is distracted from running Preussag because he sits on eight other management boards as well.
"All for show" is how Ekkehard Wenger, a finance professor at WÙrzburg University who rivals Bruns as Germany's best-known shareholder activist, characterizes Union's campaigns. "When it really comes to actions that could have an impact, like suing companies, Union does nothing - they only talk," he says. Wenger and his organization, Verein zur F,rderung der Aktion,rsdemokratie (Society for the Protection of Small Shareholders), have brought dozens of share-holder rights suits, although they have rarely won. The most recent suit sought unsuccessfully to halt a plan that will award share options to senior DaimlerChrysler executives even if they fail to beat benchmark indexes.
Bruns doesn't think lawsuits are the most efficient way to challenge management practices. "We only have limited manpower to devote to corporate governance issues," he says, "and we try to use our time as effectively as possible. We would be remiss in our fiduciary duties to shareholders if we started devoting time and money to lawsuits."
By the time of Bruns's midsummer resignation announcement, criticism of his tactics had grown so strong and plentiful that it was immediately rumored that he had been forced out. He and the board insist that was not the case. Although all acknowledge that internal and external conflicts factored into his decision, Bruns says he saw the opportunity to help his schoolteacher wife with their newborn as a perfect chance to take a six-month break and mull over new challenges: "I've spent seven years building up equity management here, and it has been the biggest success in the industry. But I've pretty much reached my limit here. I'm not likely to learn anything new. Apart from taking some time off, going to the U.S. will help me develop as a fund manager and give me more credibility, especially if I eventually return to Germany."
Bruns is considering working for a U.S. hedge fund or opening his own investment firm. The freer American environment also appeals to him. "I see many exciting possibilities that don't exist in Germany," he says. "There are a greater variety of investing styles and many more funds in the U.S." He also mentions starting a U.S. fund management operation for Union, which would seem an unlikely career alternative if he actually had been fired.
Some believe Bruns's departure is largely a function of his generally astute sense of timing. The German equity market is down 39.4 percent this year, and economic growth is slowing worldwide. Some of Union's high-flying funds have taken hits this year. UniDynamicFonds: Europa, for example, is off 44 percent as of end-August. Going out at, or at least near, the top is usually a good idea. "He could not have chosen a better time to leave," says Ulrich Stronckheim, who has known Bruns for years and is the publisher of Wertpapier, Germany's oldest personal finance magazine. Besides, says Bruns, he feels at home in the Windy City, not least because of his Chicago accent. "One of the great things about Chicago," he says, "is it is also a beer and brats town."
In Bruns's wake, however, Ginsberg and the Union board will be left with a number of difficult decisions. Says one rival fund manager: "The names Union and Bruns are connected in the minds of investors. Union wasn't known as an equity house before Bruns's arrival, and the danger the firm faces is that its public profile will drop again, giving an edge to competitors. To avoid that they've got to replace Bruns with a media-friendly personality, which in Germany is not as easy as it might sound."
And the timing for Union is tough. With German pension programs set to begin opening up next year and the markets weak, the firm faces fresh competition from deep-pocketed competitors like Fidelity Investments and J.P. Morgan Fleming Asset Management, which have begun offering better deals than Union to individual cooperative banks that sell their products. Although it hasn't quite matched their terms, Union has had to respond by giving up some of its take on fees.
Then there is the added uncertainty of its major shareholders' intentions. Even before the merger of DG and GZ, the banks had agreed to create a new holding company, Union Fonds-Holding, that will combine the institutional, real estate and retail investment operations of the cooperatives in a single entity. Although the three businesses will maintain much of their autonomy (their back offices will be combined), most observers expect the move will tighten controls on Union. In the past, notes one Union executive, the money manager adroitly "played off" competing shareholders against one another to get the approvals it wanted. That will be harder with the new DZ Bank holding a unified majority stake under chairman Ulrich Brixner, the former head of GZ. "Now that we have a controlling shareholder, there is a good chance we will be muzzled," says the source.
The new bank management takes pains to say that will not be the case. "Union was, and still is, in a position to speak out, even loudly, if they feel it is correct," says Heinz Hilgert, a former GZ Bank investment banker who will head private banking and asset management at the combined DZ Bank. Hilgert, who has chaired Union's supervisory committee since January 1999, acknowledges that there have been "frictions" over the years but emphasizes that they have been "handled in a professional way." How does he view Bruns's tactics? "I would not say I favor Union's activism, but I would say I respect it," says Hilgert, who denies putting any pressure on Union's board about DT.
Aside from integrating some back-office operations, Hilgert says the bank is most enthusiastic about achieving a new marketing first at the cooperatives: Customers will shortly begin receiving a single statement for all of their fund holdings, regardless of the provider. To date, most fund companies have resisted this innovation for fear of promoting their competition. It will be the first time this service has been offered in Germany.
In late September, however, with Bruns still in charge of equities, the focus remains on shareholder rights. His latest goal has been to export his activism to other European markets - notably Spain and Italy, where Union began selling its funds a little over a year ago. This year Union or its local representatives showed up at the AGMs of Italian state-owned electricity company Enel, Spanish electricity company Endesa and Dutch telephone company KPN to press for corporate changes. Last year the targets were Italian oil company ENI and carmaker Fiat, as well as Spanish hotel group Sol Melia.
As at home, Union's activities generate media attention and help move product. At Enel's May AGM, Union complained about the Italian government's majority stake, excessive state interference, the company's sluggish pace of cost-cutting and a share price that advanced only 3.2 percent in one year, versus 25.9 percent for the EuroStoxx 50. Drees is enthusiastic about the local press coverage Union generated: "We got more than 20 positive articles in Italian newspapers, a tremendous amount of applause at the AGM itself, and we had private shareholders coming up to our representative and saying, 'You're clearly doing a good job for your shareholders; where can we buy your products?' We were very pleased."
For the moment at least, Union's aggressive activism may find a more hospitable welcome in foreign countries than it does in Germany.
