Metalworking Community Mourns the Loss of Lothar Horn

The entrepreneur Lothar Horn died on Feb. 5, 2023 at the age of 66. Horn was the managing director of Paul Horn GmbH in Tübingen, Germany. He shaped the Horn Group into an internationally successful manufacturer of precision tools with production sites in England, Italy, the Czech Republic and the U.S. The company has additional subsidiaries in France, Hungary, China, Mexico, Turkey and Thailand. The company is said to be the largest industrial employer in Tübingen. Lothar Horn is regarded as a pioneer and visionary in the industrial sector. His son Markus, managing director of Paul Horn GmbH since 2018, will continue to run the company, now in its third generation of family ownership, together with Matthias Rommel, also managing director.

Horn, a technology enthusiast and business economist, joined his parents' company in 1991. Before that, he gained experience in the IT industry and in management consultancies. He became managing director on Jan. 1, 1995. In 1999, Lothar Horn created new production and administration facilities, as well as a demonstration, research and development center at the Tübingen headquarters. The new building combined all business processes in one location for the first time, including a coating center.

“Technology determines costs,” epitomizes Horn’s driving force to be successful selling high-precision tools into world markets. The expansion of production and administration buildings also involved the reorganization of processes. In addition to production and administration, qualification and customer training took on increasing importance and space at Paul Horn GmbH under Horn’s direction. The Horn Academy is an investment in the company’s people and employees. In addition to training internal and external people, it also offers apprenticeships, dual study programs, retraining and further education.

According to the company, Horn relied on freedom, trust and a culture that allows mistakes, as well as the opportunity to learn from them. People were just as important to Horn as technology or modern processes. “His appreciation was for our customers as well as our employees,” says his successor Markus Horn.