Without credit

摘要

By german standards, Rolf Heine-mann's company is unusual, and not only because of its inspiring history. Mr Heinemann runs Robotron, a Dresden maker of data-warehousing software, and owns 53% of it. In Communist times he was a technician at Robotron's state-owned predecessor, a conglomerate of the same name with 70,000 workers in East Germany. He began on his own in 1990 with DM50,000 (then $30,000) of capital. After more than a decade of careful reinvestment of profits, the modern Robotron has sales of EUD11m ($11.5m) a year and employs 125.