Max Grundig built Europe's biggest electronics maker — then refused to adopt transistors

Max Grundig founded Grundig Radio-Werke in 1946, building simple radio kits in postwar Germany. The country had no consumer electronics industry — radio factories had been converted to war production or destroyed. Grundig saw the vacuum and filled it. Within a decade, his company was Europe's largest radio manufacturer and a symbol of the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle). By 1960 Grundig employed 20,000 people and dominated German living rooms with its televisions, tape recorders, and hi-fi systems.

Then came the transistor. Invented at Bell Labs in 1947, the transistor made vacuum tubes obsolete — smaller, cooler, more reliable, cheaper. Japanese companies — Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba — embraced it immediately. Sony's first transistor radio, the TR-55, appeared in 1955. By the early 1960s, Japanese transistor radios were flooding world markets. Grundig's response? Keep making tube radios. Max Grundig, a stubborn and paternalistic leader, refused to believe in transistors. He had built his empire on tubes and saw no reason to change.

For a while, nothing happened. Grundig's brand was so strong in Germany that customers kept buying tube radios. But by the 1970s the Japanese had moved upmarket — into televisions, tape recorders, hi-fi — and Grundig was still using outdated designs. The decline was slow, then accelerated. Grundig reported its first losses in 1980. Factories closed. Workers were laid off. The company that had been Europe's largest electronics manufacturer was now a relic.

Philips, the Dutch electronics giant, began buying Grundig shares in 1972. By 1984 Philips had effective control, and Max Grundig no longer ran the company he had founded. He died in 1989, still refusing to concede that the transistor had won. Grundig filed for bankruptcy in 2003. A Turkish-British joint venture (Beko and Alba) bought the consumer electronics division. The Grundig name lives on as a budget brand owned by Turkish conglomerate Koç Holding — a faint echo of what it once was.