Heraeus

What they do

Heraeus is one of Germany's largest family companies, organised in four areas: Precious Metals, Healthcare, Semiconductor and Electronics, and Industrials. Revenue, swollen by precious-metal trading, reached 43.2 billion euros in 2025, with 15,115 employees at year end. Much of that is metal passing through its hands; the technology businesses are smaller but strategically important.

Why it matters

Heraeus sits in two places in the digital supply chain. Its quartz glass and fused silica are used in semiconductor manufacturing and in optical fibre. Since January 2025 these businesses are combined as Heraeus Covantics. Heraeus says it is the largest manufacturer of synthetic fused silica for telecommunication fibres, supplying the cylinders that form fibre cladding, and that a modern preform yields 4,000 kilometres of fibre. Its electronics arm makes bonding wire, the fine metal threads that connect a chip to its package; Heraeus began producing pure gold bonding wire in plants in South Korea and the Philippines after the war.

Its Bitterfeld plant shows the scale: each synthetic quartz cylinder is about three metres long and weighs about 200 kilograms, and around 2012 the site said its glass had gone into more than 500 million kilometres of fibre.

• Synthetic fused silica cylinders and tubes for fibre (see Heraeus synthetic fused silica).
• Quartz glass components for chip fabs.
• Bonding wire and sinter materials for electronics.
• Precious metals trading, refining and recycling.

The German angle

The family traces its roots to a pharmacy in Hanau in the 1660s. In 1851 Wilhelm Carl Heraeus took it over, and in 1856 he developed an oxyhydrogen process that let him melt platinum in quantity, the start of the industrial business. Heraeus engineer Richard Küch later developed a process for melting rock crystal into high-purity quartz glass. In 1991 Heraeus laid the foundation stone of a synthetic quartz plant in Bitterfeld to supply the optical fibre industry; it opened in 1992.

Sources

• Heraeus: Facts and figures
• Heraeus: Heraeus Comvance
• SEMI: Heraeus Covantics
• Wikipedia: Heraeus