The businessman
At the age of 22 Franz-Wal­ter Aumund entered the AUMUND busi­ness, the com­pany his grand­father had foun­ded as an engin­eer­ing office in 1922, and which his father had sig­nific­antly expan­ded with the addi­tion of pro­duc­tion facil­ities. Pre­cise engin­eer­ing work and a sound grasp of prac­tice had been facil­itated by both of the pre­vious gen­era­tions. This left Franz-Wal­ter Aumund to set his own emphases for the com­pany.

As a young man he was drawn to explor­ing the world, and this influ­enced the bene­fit he brought to the com­pany. Qual­ities such as look­ing out­side the box, approach­ing unfa­mil­iar cul­tures with tol­erance, and tap­ping into poten­tial mar­kets, were in his blood, which meant that he not only worked on suc­cess­ively increas­ing the pro­por­tion of goods expor­ted by AUMUND, but the estab­lish­ment of the over­seas sub­sidi­aries was also down to him.

On the occa­sion of the 100th anniversary in 2022 Franz-Wal­ter Aumund was able to look back with pride on the inter­nation­alisa­tion of the Group of com­pan­ies, which he had made pos­sible: 25,000 AUMUND machines in around 150 coun­tries as well as 500 employ­ees from 25 nations, speak­ing 30 dif­fer­ent lan­guages, are stat­ist­ics which speak for them­selves.

The enabler
“My door is always open to my employ­ees!” For Franz-Wal­ter Aumund these were not just empty words. Even though he was respons­ible for the “big pic­ture” he never lost sight of his employ­ees, and it was import­ant to him to act­ively pro­mote and sup­port careers. Employ­ees who stood out as motiv­ated and showed ini­tiat­ive could always count on his sup­port. This did not only include train­ing meas­ures and oppor­tun­ities for advance­ment in the same loc­ation, but he also opened doors for peri­ods of time to be spent in other AUMUND sub­sidi­aries, which enabled people to exper­ience other cul­tures and under­stand the type of daily chal­lenges faced at the other end of the world.

The philanthropist
Franz-Wal­ter Aumund’s dec­ades of trav­elling also gave the decis­ive impetus for the key areas of his phil­anthropic com­mit­ment, because in par­tic­ular the cement plants of his cus­tom­ers around the globe are often “in the middle of nowhere”, as he liked to put it. In rural regions, away from the pulsat­ing met­ropolis, he saw much suf­fer­ing over the years and had become more and more con­scious of his own priv­ileged back­ground. Hav­ing the free­dom to be able to act­ively shape your life accord­ing to your poten­tial had been a mat­ter of course for him, but he came to see it as a great asset, which he wanted to provide to young people around the world. Giv­ing chil­dren and young people the oppor­tun­ity to lead a self-determ­ined life through tar­geted sup­port along the entire edu­cation chain became a key focus of his fund­ing activ­ities.

He died on 4 Feb­ruary 2023 at the age of 78 years.