DOING BUSINESS WITH GERMANS
Forty years ago I found out what it's like to do business with Germans. The lessons learned, I've discovered since, can apply to dealing with businessfolk in general who don't play fair.
During my stay as a director in a Belgian steel mill I was in direct competition with the biggest steel mills of Germany. I was the first to export our special steels to Germany, something like selling sand to the Arabs.
When I started travelling to Germany I found a closed market from the heavy steel industry down to the smallest distributor. They had one price list and the biggest buyers, the German coal mines, still had to buy rigidly from the local distributor. The mines bought thousands and thousands of tons per week and the local distributor got rich while asleep. It was an ironclad market, completely locked up. When I visited the distributors they laughed me out of town.
So I went to the German coal mines and the German ship yards with impossibly low prices. What I expected happened, those consumers called their distributors, who called the big steel mills. Within a couple of weeks I was called out of the blue by a "Herr General Direktor Wolff" who from very high in his steel blue sky ordered me to cease my foolish interference in the German market or else!
I told him politely that I was going into the German steel market no matter what...