His great-grandfather Carl Illies senior (1840-1910) had taken over the oldest German-Japanese trading house Louis Kniffler & Co. in 1880 founded in Nagasaki in 1859 and renamed it Carl Illies & Co. [1] In Hamburg, Illies attended the Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums, completed an apprenticeship at the Berenberg Bank after his Abitur and then studied economics in the USA.
Illies expanded the activities of the trading house to selected cities in Africa and the China network with eight additional office locations.
Illies died at only 59 years of age and left the company to his son Carl Michael Illies, who is now the 5th generation to run the trading house.
[3] He was Vice-President of the Ostasiatischer Verein [de], which his great-grandfather had co-founded in 1900, and for many years Chairman of the country committees Japan, Korea and Taiwan of the central associations of the German economy BDI and DIHK.
The Carl-Heinz Illies scholarship at the Deutsche Stiftung Musikleben is named after him.