Fuchs SE

German multinational manufacturing company

Fuchs SE is a German multinational manufacturer of lubricants, and related speciality products. The company's headquarters are at Mannheim, Baden Württemberg, Germany, where the company was founded in 1931. Fuchs is a public company listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. As of 2008, it is a constituent of the MDAX trading index of German mid cap companies. Fuchs is the largest independent lubricant manufacturer in the world.

The company was founded by Rudolf Fuchs on May 30, 1931. It initially traded under the name Rudolf Fuchs, but was then renamed Rudolf Fuchs Mineraloelwerke in 1939. The company's Guaranteed Pennsylvania Motor Oil, under the brand Penna Pura, was produced and bottled in the Mannheim slaughterhouse and distributed to transport companies in the port of Mannheim. In 1937, he acquired a plot of land on Friesenheimer Island, where the new company headquarters were inaugurated in 1939.

At the beginning of World War II, Fuchs lost clients, who had to downsize their vehicle fleets and hand them over to the Wehrmacht, as well as personnel, as the male employees were drafted into the war. He found new clients in the industry and from then on developed industrial oils.

In 1968, the first foreign subsidiaries were founded in France and Spain. In 1981, Fuchs also entered the Australian, Asian and American markets. In 1985, the company signed a joint venture agreement in China, which led to the first production facility in Yingkou in 1988. By then, Fuchs was a group with 80 production and trading companies. In 1984, Fuchs Beteiligungsgesellschaft KG changed its name to Fuchs Petrolub AG Oel + Chemie. In the same year, Fuchs purchased the British Batoyle Freedom Group company of Norfolk. In 2016, the company initiated its largest investment program to date. Around 300 million euros were invested in plant expansions and the construction of new production facilities worldwide. Between 2016 and 2018, for example, new grease plants were built in the USA and South Africa as well as new production facilities in Australia and Sweden. In addition, a new plant for lubricants was opened in Wujiang, China, and the Asian headquarters and the research and development centre in Shanghai were expanded and modernized. Most recently, a new polyurea plant was built in Kaiserslautern and a new office building at the Mannheim site. Fuchs has also repeatedly taken over smaller, long standing trading partners (including in Egypt, Australia, Finland, Italy and the USA) and sometimes larger manufacturers, including Statoil Fuel & Retail Lubricants AB (SFR Lubricants) (2015), Deutsche Pentosin Werke GmbH (2015) and Nye Lubricants Inc. (2021). In 2017, Manfred Fuchs retired from the Supervisory Board; his successor was his daughter Susanne Fuchs. At the Annual General Meeting on May 3, 2023, it was decided to change the name from Fuchs Petrolub SE to Fuchs SE.

The company's headquarters are located in Mannheim on Friesenheimer Insel. With its investment in E Lyte Innovations, a producer of liquid electrolytes for lithium ion batteries, Fuchs also entered the market for electrolytes at the beginning of 2022. Since 2020, the Fuchs Group has been producing CO2 compensated products across all its manufacturing subsidiaries. Since 2021, all non producing subsidiaries and all joint ventures have also been included in the goal of CO2 neutrality.