Ola Källenius, CEO of Mercedes-Benz, rejected a proposal from the Trump administration to relocate the company’s headquarters to the United States.
According to The New York Post, Källenius told the German publication The Pioneer that Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, presented the headquarters relocation proposal last year.
The outlet reported that Källenius told Lutnick that while the company is global, it could not be “dismantled.” “The star has been a global company for over 100 years, but our roots are in Swabia. Those roots cannot and should not be uprooted,” Källenius told The Pioneer.
The “star” refers to the three-pointed logo of Mercedes-Benz. Swabia, known in German as Schwaben, is the region in southwestern Germany where the company’s headquarters in Stuttgart is located.
Källenius, who is Swedish and became the first non-German to serve as Chairman and CEO of the Mercedes-Benz Group, noted that Lutnick’s proposal reflected “the intense global competition for capital that industrial centers in Europe are facing.”
Although Källenius rejected the idea of moving the headquarters, Mercedes later announced that it would transfer production of a sport utility vehicle from Germany to its factory in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, as noted by Bloomberg.
Photos: Creative Commons / Public Domain. This content was created with the help of AI and reviewed by the editorial team.
