August Kuehne

August Kühne co-founded the forwarding business in Bremen in 1890. His descendants, son Alfred Kühne and grandson Klaus-Michael Kühne, later controlled the company and expanded it into a global logistics group.

Kuehne + Nagel possesses a historic, foundational founding story, rooted in the mercantile power of 19th-century German seaport cities and positioned to exploit the explosion of early globalized trade. The company was founded in 1890 in the bustling port city of Bremen, Germany, by two ambitious merchants: August Kühne and Friedrich Nagel. At the time Bremen was a hub for lucrative raw materials imported into the rapidly industrializing German Empire. Kühne and Nagel did not want to build ships; they recognized that the true value lay in organizing the complex paperwork, customs clearing, and inland transportation for those shipments. Their foundational key move was focusing on specialized agricultural commodities. They dominated the import of raw cotton from the United States and lucrative sugar. The defining corporate pivot occurred in the mid-20th century under the aggressive, leadership of Klaus-Michael Kühne (August Kühne's grandson). Klaus-Michael recognized that traditional, local freight forwarding was dying. He executed an aggressive, strategy of global expansion, moving the corporate headquarters to Switzerland in 1969 and opening offices across Asia and the Americas. Klaus-Michael transformed a traditional, localized German forwarding agency into a globally integrated logistics leader. By heavily embracing digital IT systems in the 1990s long before his rivals, he ensured the Kühne family maintained lucrative control over the foundational nervous system of modern global trade.