The Samwer Brothers - The Most Aggressive Guys on the Internet

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject Business economics - Business Ethics, Corporate Ethics, grade: 4.0, Griffith College Dublin, course: Business Ethics, language: English, abstract: The Samwers - three German brothers - are the most successful Internet entrepreneurs worldwide. There is no successful German Internet Company they are not involved in. There is no international Internet trend they don't bring to Germany. There is no exit they don't profit from in some way. There is not investor that does not blindly trust the Samwers (Treser 2011).The brothers Alexander (36), Oliver (38) and Marc (40) - better known as "The Samwers" or "The Samwer Brothers" made a pact as teenagers that they will do business whith each other one day. And just 20 years later they are "the god fathers of the internet" and are globally feared for their aggressive, unfair and hard to work with business style - but one cannot argue with their track record. Their first venture in 1999 was selling their 100-day-old start up Alando (a one to one clone of eBay) to eBay for 50 million dollars. Since then they founded or incubated almost all German internet success stories such as Jamba, StudVZ, MyVideo, Bigpoint, CityDeal, eDarling, buyVIP, netmoms, tradoria, erento, Zalando, Wimdu, Panfu, Pligna, FP Commerce, 7trends, Netzoptiker, Kolibrishop, Fahrrad.de, Fitness.de, myphotobook and dozens more (Haller 2011).They have more money, more speed, more competiveness, more resources, more hard working people and more ruthlessness than everyone else in that field and are now also expanding the aggressive business style into emerging markets such as Russia, Brazil, Turkey etc. where they don't have a bad reputation yet (CN Articles 2011). However, if the Samwers continue behaving as the do in Germany in their new target countries, they will very likely encounter the same problems as the ones in Germany now that can all be traced back to their unethical behavior towards stakeholders. So their new international focus could be used to rethink their management style and become more ethical and thus more successful, the following analysis will show.