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A lot can happen in business in a few days.

On Monday this week, Heinrich Hiesinger, the chief executive of German industrial giant ThyssenKrupp, was explaining to investors and the media about the benefits of pooling his company's steel-making operations in a joint venture with those of Anglo-Dutch firm Tata Steel, insisting to Sky News he was confident of overcoming the objections of some of his shareholders to the deal.

Today, Mr Hiesinger looks set to leave his job, having offered to resign.

In a statement, released on Thursday night, he said: "The broad support of our shareholders and the supervisory board was the basis for [our] success…since 2011."

The implication is that Mr Hiesinger knew he no longer had the support of shareholders and also some members of the supervisory board, two of whom voted against going ahead with the joint venture, according to the Financial Times.

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He has been under fire since the terms of the joint venture with Tata Steel became public last weekend.

The deal, creating Europe's second-largest steelmaker with 48,000 employees and €17billion worth of sales, saw both Tata Steel and ThyssenKrupp each take a 50% stake in the business. In the event of a stock market flotation of the business, in future, ThyssenKrupp would receive 55% of the proceeds and would get to dictate the timing of any flotation.

However, that did not satisfy some of ThyssenKrupp's shareholders, who argued the German company was getting the poor end of the deal. Elliott, the US activist investor, had argued ThyssenKrupp's stake in the joint venture should have been nearer 80%, given the greater efficiency of its steel business compared with that of Tata Steel, which employs 8,500 people in Britain.

Both it and Cevian, a Swedish investor whose 18% stake makes it ThyssenKrupp's second-largest shareholder, have also been critical of the company's recent performance under Mr Hiesinger. Shares of the company are down some 28% since he took the helm in January 2011.

ThyssenKrupp, which is based in Essen and whose origins go back 217 years, is a bellwether of German industry. Created in 1999 by the merger of two huge German steel companies, Thyssen and Krupp, its activities extend far beyond steel-making and include making car and aircraft parts, submarines, lifts and escalators, components for household appliances and chemicals.

Yet it was in a bad way when Mr Hiesinger arrived, losing €8bn a year, due to a series of ill-fated and hugely expensive acquisitions in steel-making in Brazil and the US. The company, which was highly unionised, was also paying out €600mn a year in generous pensions to former employees.

Mr Hiesinger's vision was to make the business less complicated and to move it from relatively low-return activities like steel-making to higher-value activities in the technology sector. He sold a number of peripheral businesses in steel and shipbuilding, brought down steel-making's share of group sales from 40% to 30%, returned ThyssenKrupp to profit in 2014 for the first time in four years and enabled it to resume paying dividends to shareholders.

Supporters of Mr Hiesinger, who was hired from Siemens and who was the company's first CEO not to have a background in steel-making, insist he has achieved much at the company.

Ulrich Lehner, the chairman, said: "The board under the leadership of Heinrich Hiesinger has freed ThyssenKrupp from an existential crisis and made the company ready for the future. Without Heinrich Hiesinger there would be no ThyssenKrupp today. I am deeply grateful for what he achieved."

But Cevian and others argued he did not go fast enough. They wanted to see faster and more dramatic change with the company's highly-valued lifts and escalators business, one of its jewels, to be floated off separately. A more radical break-up now seems more likely.

Where this will leave Tata Steel's UK employees, including the 4,000 or so who work at the giant steelworks in Port Talbot in South Wales, is uncertain.