As a child, Martin Richenhagen first made a living by working on a farm, harvesting potatoes and earning $3 an hour.
These early experiences taught him both the value of farming
and the hard work involved with it, but it also sowed an appreciation for the important role that agriculture plays in the
world.
Now, he’s reaping that knowledge as the chairman, president
and CEO of AGCO Corp., which manufactures and distributes
agriculture equipment to help farmers perform better.
“Every year, we add about 70 million people to the world
population, and those people, of course, need proper food,”
Richenhagen says. “This can only be achieved by increased
productivity in farming due to the fact that the availability of
farmland is limited. Every day, we lose about 200 acres of
farmland globally, so that means, for our business, we need to
provide advanced technologies that help farmers improve
their productivity.”
For years, achieving that goal meant buying up other companies
and adding them to the AGCO brand. The company was founded
in a management buyout of Deutz-Allis from KHD in 1990. The
fledgling company started with revenue of about $200 million, but
during the next 14 years, it grew to more than $5 billion in revenue
after going through more than 20 acquisitions, with Richenhagen
arriving in 2004. While the company had been successful, he knew
AGCO needed to change focus if it wanted to continue growing
and benefiting its customers.
“The focus was very much on identifying the next target and taking over the next company,” he says. “The consolidation of the
industry, in the meantime, was almost completed, and therefore, we
had to change the strategy and define a new strategy, which was the
most important thing I had to do at the beginning, four years ago.”
