Bosch is the cleanest separation of ownership from control in European industry, and it was built on purpose.
The audited shareholder note in the 2025 annual report lists three holders of Robert Bosch GmbH: Robert Bosch Stiftung GmbH with 93.99% of the shares, ERBO II GmbH with 5.36%, and Robert Bosch Industrietreuhand KG with 0.01%. Robert Bosch GmbH holds treasury stock equal to the remaining 0.64%. The percentages are exact and they sum to a hundred.
Then the same report gives the voting rights, and the order reverses. Some 93% of the votes sit with the Industrietreuhand — the holder of one hundredth of one percent of the capital. The remaining 7% belongs to the founder's descendants. The foundation that owns almost the entire company appears nowhere in that sentence, because it transferred the voting rights attached to its shares to the Industrietreuhand and kept the economics.
That is a Control Wedge of roughly 93 percentage points, and it is worth being precise about why it is unusual. Most large wedges are manufactured with share classes: ten votes here, one vote there, and a conversion trigger to hold it together. Bosch has no share classes at all. One class of shares, one vote each, and a contractual transfer of the voting rights to a separate limited partnership whose job is described in the annual report as performing "the entrepreneurial ownership functions." The wedge is written in a contract rather than a charter.
What the trust cannot do
Here the profile parts company with the usual summary, which stops at "a foundation owns Bosch" and leaves the impression that whoever holds the votes runs the place.
Robert Bosch GmbH is subject to the German Codetermination Act. Its supervisory board has twenty members. Shareholders with voting rights appoint ten of them. Employee representatives elect the other ten. The supervisory board is the body that appoints and monitors the board of management.
So the holder of 93% of the votes appoints half of the board that appoints management. Not a majority — half. Both decision rights in the table below are therefore marked as needing another party's agreement, which is not a hedge about the Industrietreuhand's influence in practice. It is the statutory position, and it is the single most common thing an ownership-percentage analysis of a German company gets wrong.
A reader arriving from a US frame will expect 93% of the votes to mean control of the board. In Germany it does not, and the gap between those two expectations is most of what a control profile is for.
What would end it
Nothing scheduled. The arrangement traces to the founder's will and has stood since 1964. There is no time-based sunset, no transfer trigger, no ownership threshold. The structure's most durable feature is circular: the foundation would need voting rights to change the arrangement, and the arrangement is what took its voting rights away.
What is not established here
The precise voting percentage. Bosch reports "some 93 percent" and does not publish a decimal, while the capital figures are exact to two places. The figures above therefore pair an exact economic share with a rounded voting share, and the wedge inherits that rounding.
The internal governance of the Industrietreuhand — how its managing partners are selected, and what majorities they need among themselves — is also not established by the sources cited here. That question decides who actually directs 93% of the votes, and answering it properly requires the partnership's own constitutional documents rather than the annual report.