Heidi Senger-Weiss died on October 19 at the age of 82. Transport and logistics company Gebrüder Weiss announced this in a press release on Friday. She led the company together with her husband Paul from 1968 to 2004. In the following years (2005 to 2017) she was a supervisory director.
During her 36 years at the highest operational level, Heidi Senger-Weiss not only had a lasting impact on the Lauterach company. “She inspired the entire industry with her modern, network-oriented thinking,” the company said. As president of the Central Association for Forwarding and Logistics and in various positions at the Austrian Chamber of Commerce, she successfully advocated the importance of logistics and repeatedly clearly emphasized its importance to the economy to the public.
Inclusion in the „Hall of Fame“
Through their business and personnel management, Gebrüder Weiss became a role model for medium-sized family businesses. Due to her major contributions to logistics, Heidi Senger-Weiss was inducted into the Logistics Hall of Fame of the Federal German Ministry of Transport in Berlin in 2015 – as the first woman ever. Heidi Senger-Weiss received numerous other awards for her life’s work, most recently the Grand Silver Medal of Honor and Decision of the Republic of Austria in November 2022.
Family entrepreneur par excellence
Heidi Senger-Weiss was born in Vienna in 1941 as the only child of Ferdinand and Gertrude Weiss. She spent her childhood in Bregenz. After completing her studies in economics at the University for World Trade in Vienna, she gained practical shipping experience in Basel, Rotterdam, Paris and New York. In 1965 she joined her parents’ company.
When her father died just three years later at the age of 66, the then 27-year-old took over the management of Gebrüder Weiss; actively supported by her fiancé Paul Senger, whom she married in Bregenz in June 1969. Three children are born to the couple. Over the next three and a half decades, Heidi Senger-Weiss and her husband reorganized the traditional freight forwarding company Gebrüder Weiss, which was still domestically oriented.
On her initiative, the parcel service APS Austria Paket System (later DPD Austria) was founded in 1988 together with two partners. He quickly becomes the Austrian market leader in the B2B sector. She withstood economic setbacks such as the oil price crisis or accession to the EU in 1995 (loss of 70 percent of customs clearance) with courageous internal business innovations and, together with her husband Paul Gebrüder, developed Weiss into a modern logistics group.
Like few others, Heidi Senger-Weiss stood for social responsibility in logistics at an early age. She was a family business through and through and lived values such as involvement, involvement and respect for her employees. She said about herself: “I never thought I would be the best freight forwarder. My talent is to motivate and convince people about a subject, so that they get to work with enthusiasm and become involved in a good cause.”
Source: Krone
I’m Ben Stock, a journalist and author at Today Times Live. I specialize in economic news and have been working in the news industry for over five years. My experience spans from local journalism to international business reporting. In my career I’ve had the opportunity to interview some of the world’s leading economists and financial experts, giving me an insight into global trends that is unique among journalists.
