Sixt: Erich Sixt handed the wheel to his sons in 2021 and revenue passed €4B

Erich Sixt was 25 in 1969 when he took over his sick father's Munich taxi operation with 200 rental cars, and over half a century he built Sixt into a group with revenue approaching €3 billion that alternated with Europcar as Europe's largest car rental company. He repeatedly refused to sell, telling speculators linking Sixt with Volkswagen or others: the company is my life, and he had always made sure his family kept control of the business.

In March 2021, mid-pandemic, he announced the generational change: after the June 16 annual meeting he would leave the management board for the supervisory board chair, and the board appointed his twin sons Alexander and Konstantin Sixt joint chief executives from June 17, 2021 — the fourth generation to lead the company. Both had sat on the management board since 2015 running strategy and sales, pushing the digital merger of rental, carsharing and subscription. Alexander brushed off doubts about a dual leadership: they were a tested duo, he said.

Under the co-CEOs the group kept growing through the travel recovery. In 2024 Sixt offered an average of 184,300 vehicles worldwide, opened fifty new stations and lifted revenue 10.5% to more than €4 billion, betting heavily on the United States while keeping a stated goal of a 70–90% electric fleet by 2030.

Revenue grew from about €3B in pandemic-hit 2020/21 to more than €4B in 2024, up 10.5%, with 184,300 vehicles on offer — all while staying family-controlled.

Erich Sixt announced the handover while still firmly in control, at an age he joked was a decade past retirement, so the succession read as strength rather than retreat.

The heirs had six years on the management board before the top job, so the co-CEO structure took over tested operators, not apprentices.

Keeping the family in control was treated as strategy, not sentiment: Erich said he would never sell, and the sons ruled out any takeover by a carmaker.

The timing — mid-pandemic — meant the fourth generation started from a depressed base and owned the recovery rather than inheriting a peak.

Handing over from strength, even mid-crisis, spares the next generation a legitimacy fight; heirs groomed inside the boardroom for years make co-leadership workable.

The handover held. Alexander Sixt fronted the 2025 annual press conference as sole-voice chief executive while Konstantin ran his side of the group. The electric-fleet transition proved harder than planned: weak resale values for electric cars kept 2024 net profit down by more than a quarter to €244 million and pushed the dividend from €3.90 to €2.70, but revenue still crossed €4 billion and management held to its electrification target, betting the US market keeps compounding.