This topic tracks Sixt management changes. Its members of the mangement board as well as executive leadership have been in their current roles for less than 3 years. However, they have held other senior leadership roles in the company before and those who joined recently look experienced.
You can find a description of each executive in our wiki article: Sixt: Management - InvestmentWiki
Sixt leadership remains one of the largest wildcards for Sixt after the company founder Erich Sixt passed the company to his two sons Alexander and Konstantin Sixt. The family controls more than 50% of the companies voting shares.
Unfortunately a lot of resources when it comes to Sixt are in german given that Sixt is a relatively small german company.
I recently listed to an impressive podcast with Alexander Sixt in which he highlighted good principles like being costumer centric or choosing key focus areas wisely and gives insights into his believes, family upbringing and career background. (German)
On the other side there have been reports about an autoritarian leadership style and personell losses among Sixt Top management.
Assessment
On a scale of 1-10 i continue to assess Sixt key leadership at 6-9 and factoring in a conservative 6 into the valuation for now while uncertainties persist.
Everything i heard from and about them until this last report has been reasonable. Both Alexander and Constantin Sixt worked almost a decade at Sixt before ultimately taking over the company and they have certainly been able to learn a lot from their father. According to Alexander Sixt they try to empower people and give them responsibility which contradicts the reports. That said we should certainly have a closer eye on the situation.
Apparently, its chief commercial officer, James Adams recently left the company [1].
James Adams joined Sixt in 2020 as head of U.K business and became CCO in 2022 [2]
I=9
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-franz-weinberger-841490164/
Assessment
It’s quite strange that Dr Kai is leaving despite Sixt’s spokesperson saying 3 months ago that “very positive” discussions about his contract extension were ongoing.
The new CFO seems to have less experience in the main finance role. Probably comments about the authoritarian regime in the company has forced them to promote their own instead of searching for a more experienced role outside? Promoting own executives is obviously a good culture.
@moritz what’s your take?
That is not good news, in my opinion.
To me, the whole press release reads quite strangely and reminds me of an episode of “Succession”
The fact that the old family patriarch who built Sixt to its current size and not his son Alexander Sixt, the current CEO, is quoted indicates tensions between Alexander and the departing CFO.
The fact that there is an internal promotion could also point to a sudden departure of the current CFO that caught Sixt off guard but to be fair Sixt recruiting it’s top leadership internally in the past as well.
Sixt apparently also sees the need to highlight “continuation” in the press release with the reappointment of the two Co-Ceos + COO and mention of the fifth board member Vinzenz Pflanz.
Overall I continue to view Sixt as cheaply valued but my appetite to increase the position diminished for now.
Sixt employee reviews point to a culture of fear, LinkedIn checks indicate senior management high turnover rate
I went through employee reviews at Kununu in the past five months and here is what stood out to me;
Negatives:
Positives
I tried to check the validity of these comments and most of them checked out;
I went through around 200 profiles of senior-level management (based in Germany) at LinkedIn and over 52 were appointed or promoted between January 2023 and September 2024. This implies that those they replaced likely left the company.
In 2017, a research by WELT AM SONNTAG established that Sixt employees were under sales pressure which leads to customers being tricked to pay more for products they don’t need. According to the newspaper, employees learned this tricks through sales training courses or during on-the-job training sessions.
Last year, Sixt fired three employees who attempted to set up a works council. The three worn a labor suit against Sixt but later accepted to terminate their contracts through mutual agreement .
Erich Sixt was considered authoritarian himself when he was the CEO, hence there is a chance that his sons are following in his footsteps. It’s also believed that he’s still wielding management power at Sixt despite having resigned as CEO.
During the recent annual general meeting (AGM), DWS Investment which has 5% voting right in the company pointed out that there is deficiency in the supervisory board.
“Accordingly, we also see, as we did last year, clear deficiencies in the composition of the supervisory board. The requirements for independence are currently met by only one member,” Sabrina Reeh of DWS wrote in a letter to Sixt.
Hmm, this is interesting, especially the context. I did not know that Erich Sixt was considered to be authoritarian.
On the other side, we might face a generally negative bias when we are conducting this kind of research because mainly employees with negative experiences comment on platforms like Kununu and negative articles often attract more clicks so the media can be biased/inaccurate as well.
I just checked out the overall Kununu ratings of the Sixt competitors Europcar, Enterprise, Hertz, Avis and Starcar and most of them have worse overall ratings.
Considering this do you continue to believe that Sixt might have a problem culturally or is it average in the car rental industry? (I did not check out all the descriptions/ratings of the competitors in detail)
Do you think the rating got worse over time? (Especially in the last couple of years since Eric Sixt sons took over) If this is not the case and everything continues to run as before I think Sixt has no problem from an investor perspective because it was Erich Sixt and the culture he build that lead the company to become the giant it is today.
I think if you can find more recent articles which describe that the father is still involved this would be a good sign. I saw some youtube videos of him from some years ago and got the feeling that he was substantially getting older and I did not find any video since. I had also talked with someone who talked with the CFO of Sixt and if I remember correctly he told me that Erich Sixt was not fully fit anymore.
Yeah, this reviews could be biased. But I don’t think it’s possible to end up in a situation where almost all recent reviews are negative (which is the case for Sixt). If I were to base my conclusion on these reviews, I would say Sixt started getting worse at the end of 2023 (probably management got under pressure due to rising costs) since reviews at the beginning of 2023 and even in 2022 are somehow more positive. Also, something must explain the high executive turnover. But yeah, its ratings is within the industry average (but doesn’t mean it didn’t get worse).
I couldn’t find additional articles saying he’s still in charge of the company. But after the sons took over, there were changes in strategies which may indicate that he no longer has full control. For instance;
I have read all ratings back until Oktober 2023 by now and have to say the negative trend which started approx March 2024 is quite worrisome.
Especially the fact that a lot of employees say that the company has been good and is not anymore stands out to me. (worse culture, reputation etc.)
This was mentioned somewhere in the description in around maybe 10 out of 30-40 ratings since March.
Do you have ideas how we can get more insights into what is going on?
I think we need to make those kinds of checks a pretty regular workflow for all our portfolio companies.
I think Erich Sixt wanted to maintain some oversight by assuming the chairman of the board role but is likely quite uninvolved at the current stage.
For now, I have exhausted all the ideas I had. I have used all the keywords (even in German) and even gone through LinkedIn posts. Maybe once we are more established, we could invite employees at LinkedIn to fill a survey on their culture anonymously.
Yes, we will certainly want to connect with fellow investors in a company, suppliers, customers, competitors, and employees in the future to generate additional insights.
One additional idea I have right now is asking ChatGPT how insights could be generated or revisit what analysts or media say.
In addition we could create an org chart in our Sixt board which describes how the company is structured and which role descriptions they use (C-Level, SVP, VP, Senior-Director, Director etc.) We could also try to indicate how many persons are on a certain level e.g. director in order to get a better feeling if the turnover that you describe on those levels is significant compared to industry standards or not.
Yeah, good idea. I actually planned on creating such an organization chart.
I have taken into considerations GPT ideas on how to generate additional insights such as going searching for employee commentaries at LinkedIn/X/Reddit, looking for employee surveys and searching for analysts commentaries. I only managed to find the following;
One additional idea i have is looking for employee review platforms in other markets.
I think Kununu has mostly reviews out of Germany. Maybe there are reviews on for example Glassdoor from U.S employees or also reviews from employees of other major European markets on other platforms.
Getting a more comprehensive picture of what is going on at Sixt remains a priority.
I am still undecided what to do but reducing the position esp. if we find more worrying signs is certainly an option.
Edit: Depending on our findings, we might need to consider whether Sixt is currently performing worse than previously due to cultural problems and what effect that would have on the valuation model.
I looked at reviews from U.S employees (at Glassdoor and Indeed) and they don’t look great as well. But it appears it has always been like that. I would rate reviews from France and U.K employees as fair. Reviews from U.K employees have significantly improved compared to a year ago.
Germany employees at Glassdoor also mentioned high turnover of executives.
Thank you for the insights. I think having some summaries at the top is good but overall we can improve the structure of this article a bit to highlight important key points faster. What do you think?
Here are some ideas what could be improved and If possible would be nice to get:
@Aron What do you think about working on a comprehensive rating of Sixt management (judged from 1-10) taking elements like culture, other elements described in the Investmentframework and other ideas/thoughts/observations that you have into account?
I would imagine this rating would work a bit similarly than quarterly results expectations in the sense that you would aggregate all positive and negative reasons that you can think of incl. links to sources in other parts of the Wiki and Forum and then reach an assessment and rating.(but without focusing only on more recent developments but considering all insights that we have since the new Sixt leadership generation took over)
One of upside for me and others would be to get an good overview of all our observations on the qualify of management and team and reflections about them including potentially arguments and thoughts that I did not consider so far.
Obviously we did not norm those ratings from 1-10 yet so this is something that we would standardize and improve over time.
The management & team rating is one of the key elements for evaluating a company and reaching a price target and is displayed in our company cards.
I will try to work on it and present the output for discussions.
Edit: I started working on it here: Sixt:Management - InvestmentWiki