Oliver Samwer has transferred his stake in Rocket Internet to the Munich-based “Oliver Samwer Familienstiftung”, a family foundation governed by the laws of the Principality of Liechtenstein and subject to unlimited taxation in Germany.
This means that all income of the foundation as well as all its distributions will be subject to taxation in Germany. Oliver Samwer’s motivation is to establish a long-term and lasting shareholding structure.
In 2007, Oliver Samwer co-founded Rocket Internet with his two brothers, Alexander and Marc who joined the billionaires camp after taking theor company public. Oliver, the CEO of Rocket Internet, is in charge of the firm’s expansion and growth globally and the three brothers collectively own around 40 percent of Rocket Internet. The three brothers were inspired by the dot-com boom after spending time in the U.S. in the late ’90s, where they left to launch an eBay clone dubbed Alando in 1999. After a few months, they sold the auction site to eBay for $43 million.
The first success led them to build a mobile phone content provider dubbed Jamba! which they sold to Verisign in 2004 for $273 million. In 2010, they sold dailydeals site CityDeal to Groupon for $170 million. Other success include Zalando which went public a day before Rocket and Lazada which was recently sold to Alibaba.
