Mittelstand in der Betriebswirtschaftslehre – Theorien und Modelle

Hidden champions: a review of the literature & future research avenues

“…Mittelstand companies often maintain a high equity ratio and are usually not listed on the capital market, which grants them a certain independence from economic cycles and increases their autonomy in terms of capital supply (Berghoff 2006;Welter et al 2015;Audretsch and Lehmann 2016). In Germany, the house bank principle has proven its worth for Mittelstand companies, which describes the close cooperation of a Mittelstand company with a local bank (communal saving banks and credit cooperatives) in a long-term partnership (Vitols 2001;Reinemann 2019). The cooperation is characterised by mutual trust, whereby the banks usually interfere with the strategic alignment of the company to a limited extent.…”