Otto is the chairman of Otto Group, a Hamburg-based online retail company. The closely held business operates in more than 30 countries and employs about 50,000 people. It has retail, financial services, logistics and travel divisions, and reported revenue of 16.4 billion euros ($19 billion) in the year to Feb. 28, 2022.
Michael Otto's net worth of $5.92B can buy ...
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The majority of Otto's fortune is derived from his 43% stake in Otto Group, a closely held conglomerate with interests in retail, financial services, travel and logistics. The company had revenue of 16.1 billion euros ($19 billion) and Ebitda of 1.2 billion euros in the year ended Feb. 28, 2022, according to its annual report.
Otto controls the business through Kommanditgesellschaft Atlas Vermoegensverwaltung, according to company filings.
In April 2015, Otto Group announced Michael Otto had transferred most of his shares to a non-profit foundation. Otto remains credited with the shares.
Otto Group's retail divisions are valued using the average enterprise value-to-sales and enterprise value-to-Ebit multiples of four publicly traded peers: Best Buy Co Inc, ASOS PLC, Zalando SE and Cnova.
The financial services segment is valued using the average enterprise value-to-sales multiple of two publicly traded peers: Global Payments and Total System Services.
The logistics and travel businesses are valued using the average enterprise value-to-sales and average enterprise value-to-Ebit multiple of three publicly traded peers: DKSH Holding, Logwin AG and Deutsche Post.
The value of his cash and other assets is based on his share of the family's investments, based on comments from a person familiar with them who asked not to be identified because the investments are private.
Volker Gieritz, an Otto Group spokesman, declined to comment on the net worth calculation.
Michael Otto was born in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1943, nine years after his father, Werner, was jailed for distributing anti-Hitler pamphlets. After World War II, Werner Otto took his family to Hamburg and began making shoes. He founded the Otto Group in 1949, a shoe mail-order business, with 6,000 Deutsche marks and three employees.
Michael Otto became an apprentice at a Munich bank in 1962. He obtained a doctorate in economics and joined Otto Group in 1971, becoming CEO a decade later. Throughout the 1980s, the company researched and experimented with technological advancements occurring in the U.S. At the cusp of the Internet boom, Otto played a role in a Time Warner interactive project that set out to determine whether customers in Orlando, Florida, would shop online. The experiment was a high-profile bust, though it gave Otto and his executives crucial insight into e-commerce. Introduced in 1995, Otto's online sales business was profitable within three years.
Not all of Otto's retail ventures worked out. Spiegel, its mail-order catalog business based in Chicago, filed for bankruptcy in 2003 after extending too much credit to unqualified customers. The family eventually gave up the company, and defended itself against an investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over its financial reporting.
The Otto family paid 1 billion euros in 2008 to buy back a 25 percent stake in the company from German media company WAZ Group, which had invested in the company in 1962. Seven years later, Michael Otto transferred the majority of his shares in the Group to a foundation that aims to support sustainable development and nature conversation projects, according to the foundation's website.