WAIDA Cruises is a German cruise line founded in the early 1960s and organized as a wholly owned subsidiary of Carnival Corporation & plc since 2003. Based in Rostock, Germany, AIDA Cruises caters primarily to the German-speaking market; as seagoing "club resorts", AIDA ships have on-board amenities and facilities designed to attract younger, more active vacationers. As of December 2019, the cruise line operates 13 ships, with one additional ship on order.
WAmiga is a popular music record label in Germany. Once an organ of the East German state-owned music publisher VEB Deutsche Schallplatten, Amiga became a label of the Bertelsmann Music Group in 1994.
WASS Altenburger is since 2003 the trademark of the German playing card manufacturer Spielkartenfabrik Altenburg, based in the town of Altenburg. The firm is owned by Cartamundi, of Turnhout, Belgium. ASS claims to be the market leader in Germany for playing cards. Every year almost 40 million packs of cards of many different types are manufactured in Altenburg.
WAufbau-Verlag is a German publisher. It was founded in Berlin in 1945 and became the biggest publisher in the GDR. During that time is specialised in socialist and Russian literature.
WCommunicant Semiconductor Technologies AG was a company based in Frankfurt (Oder), Eastern Germany, that aimed to mass-produce integrated circuits based on a carbon-doped silicon-germanium (Si-Ge:C) technology. The technology was developed by a local institute founded during the Communist era, Innovations for High Performance Microelectronics (IHP).
WDEFA was the state-owned film studio of the German Democratic Republic throughout the country's existence.
WElbe Flugzeugwerke GmbH is an aerospace manufacturer based in Dresden, Germany.
WFortschritt was an East German brand of tractors, combine harvesters and other agricultural machines made by VEB Fortschritt in Neustadt, Saxony. It was the largest agricultural machinery manufacturer in the nation.
WThe Handelsorganisation was a national retail business owned by the central administration of the Soviet Zone of occupation in Germany and from 1949 on by the state of the German Democratic Republic. It was created in 1948. The enterprise was arranged into different departments – industrial goods, food, restaurants and department stores – and operated the large “Centrum” department stores in many cities of the GDR. Its stores stood in competition to those of the Konsum cooperative. Nevertheless, both were established brands in the everyday life in the GDR. The HO also operated hotels. After the political turmoil in the GDR in the years 1989 and 1990 the business was sold by the Treuhand trust.
WIntershop was a chain of government-owned and operated retail stores in the German Democratic Republic in which only hard currencies could be used to purchase high-quality goods. The East German mark was not accepted as payment. Intershop was originally oriented towards visitors from Western countries, and later became an outlet where East Germans could purchase goods they could not otherwise obtain. An unintended consequence was that ordinary East Germans had some insight into the selection of goods available in the West, which they could then compare with the rather limited offerings available in their own country.
WJenapharm is a pharmaceutical company from Jena, Germany. Founded in 1950 in East Germany, the company focused from the beginning on the production and development of steroids. Due to the economic circumstances of the Eastern Bloc, the company initially used a unique process of steroid synthesis starting from hog bile, however this method was abandoned a decade later in favor of total synthesis. Initially the company produced a wide range of generic steroids, including corticosteroids, but later on it focused on anabolic steroids, estrogens and progestins.
WKamera-Werkstätten Guthe & Thorsch was a photographic equipment manufacturer based in Dresden.
WKonsum is a cooperative retail chain founded in 1945 by the Soviet Military Administration in occupied East Germany. It consisted of grocery stores, retail markets, industrial plants, and restaurants, and was a direct competitor to the Handelsorganisation.
WThe VEB Kombinat Minol, founded on 1 January 1956, was the state-owned gasoline and lubricant reseller of the German Democratic Republic.
WORWO is a brand of black and white film products, made in Germany.
WPentacon is the company name of a camera manufacturer in Dresden, Germany.
WPiko is a German model train brand in Europe that also exports to the United States and other parts of the world.
WReclam Verlag is a German publishing house, established in Leipzig in 1828 by Anton Philipp Reclam (1807–1896). It is particularly well known for the "little yellow books" of its Universal-Bibliothek, simple paperback editions of literary classics for schools and universities.
WTAKRAF is a global German industrial company based in Leipzig. TAKRAF is short for Tagebergbau-Ausrüstungen, Krane und Förderanlagen. It is a manufacturer and supplier of equipment and systems for open pit mining, bulk material handling, and minerals processing. The company is known for its huge bucket-wheel excavators, semi-mobile crushing plants, conveyors, and heap leach systems.
WThe Weiße Flotte is a shipping company with its head office in Stralsund, Germany, that offers passenger and car ferry services as well as excursions by boat, especially along the Baltic Sea coast of the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.
WSAG/SDAG Wismut was a uranium mining company in East Germany during the time of the cold war. It produced a total of 230,400 tonnes of uranium between 1947 and 1990 and made East Germany the fourth largest producer of uranium ore in the world at the time. It was the largest single producer of uranium ore in the entire sphere of control of the USSR. In 1991 after German reunification it was transformed into the Wismut GmbH company, owned by the Federal Republic of Germany, which is now responsible for the restoration and environmental cleanup of the former mining and milling areas. The head office of SDAG Wismut / Wismut GmbH is in Chemnitz-Siegmar.
WZentrum Mikroelektronik Dresden (ZMD) was regarded as the heart of East Germany's microelectronics research in the 1980s as well as its most advanced integrated circuit manufacturer. Together with TU Dresden and VEB Spurenmetalle Freiberg, ZMD formed the foundation for Silicon Saxony, a cluster of microelectronics companies that came to include new fabs by Siemens and AMD.