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Dietmar Hopp
Dietmar Hopp was born in Heidelberg in 1940. He is the most successful entrepreneur to emerge in Germany in the past 30 years. In 1972, he co-founded, along with four other former IBM employees, what was later to become SAP AG. SAP enjoyed immediate success thanks to a decisive order placed by the chemical company ICI in 1972. Today, SAP is the world’s third-largest software company, with 31,000 employees worldwide.
At the time of the initial public offering of SAP in 1988, Mr. Hopp was appointed CEO and held this position until he joined the SAP supervisory board in 1998, which he headed until his retirement in 2005.
Mr. Hopp’s swift rise to wealth allowed him to support a plethora of charitable causes. He built a modern stadium for his hometown soccer club, TSG 1899 Hoffenheim, for which he himself played as a youth. He saved a neighboring soccer club, FC Walldorf, from bankruptcy and financed a youth center for yet another club, FC Zuzenhausen. In 2006, Hopp decided to build a new, larger stadium for TSG 1899 Hoffenheim, a stadium worthy of the German premier soccer league. He also financially supported the construction of the multipurpose SAP Arena built in Mannheim, and in January 2007, he donated 3 million euros to SV Waldhoff Mannheim to build and maintain a new youth support center.
In 1995, Mr. Hopp founded the Dietmar-Hopp-Stiftung (Dietmar Hopp Foundation), which sponsors medical research and treatment development, education, social welfare services (especially for young people), and youth sports.
After a well-publicized encounter in 2004 with local authorities and the State Attorney’s Office, which ended with a short apology from the state and Mr. Hopp being cleared of all suspicion, he founded ProJustitia, an organization dedicated to researching German law, especially criminal law, and its application. Additionally, ProJustitia organizes seminars and conventions dealing with German law, such as the 4. Petersberger Tage (4th Petersberger Convention), which took place in April 2007, and which dealt with the presumption of innocence in theory and reality.
In 2006, the Hopp Foundation donated 21 million euros to merge Axaron Bioscience AG and LION Bioscience AG into a specialized pharmaceutical company that is dedicated to researching diseases of the central nervous system.
Mr. Hopp is the 1992 recipient of the German Federal Officers’ Cross of Merit, which was bestowed upon him by Erwin Teufel, the then Minister President of Baden-Wurttemberg. In 1995, he received the Bambi Award, an annual television and media prize awarded by the German media company Hubert Burda Media. In 2001, he was named an honorary citizen of Hoffenheim, Germany.