An Overview of German Centers of Corporate Dominance and Motives for Corporate Headquarters Relocation

The purpose of this paper is to identify the centers of corporate dominance in Germany, and the main drivers of recent headquarter relocations within the country. The analysis is based on a literature review, a database comprising the 10,000 most significant companies in Germany and additional research for qualitative input to support the interpretation of the findings. The findings show that corporate dominance in Germany is decentralized. Centers with relative corporate dominance tend to host a higher proportion of public limited companies. These public limited companies had a turnover of over one billion Euros, and most of these companies were founded after the year 2000. The main drivers for recent HQ relocations were corporate restructuring (mergers and demergers) and the centralization of functions. Furthermore, it has been found that differences in the trade tax burden between municipalities have had no influence on recent relocation decisions within Germany.