In 1994 BMW bought the British carmaker Rover for two billion marks. On 16 March 2000 it sold Rover again, for the symbolic sum of ten pounds. The losses were reported to be nine billion marks. BMW’s chief executive Pischetsrieder had already had to resign in 1999.
Looking back in 2015, the British magazine CAR wrote that the Germans had “killed Rover with kindness, moving too slowly on integration”. The magazine noted that in 1996 it had already exposed the failure to pool engineering and purchasing quickly.
In this case the German owner was slow to take over the processes.