Dusseldorf Post boss Frank Appel will leave the Bonn-based Dax group on May 4, 2023. This was announced by the Deutsche Post Supervisory Board after its meeting on Wednesday. His successor will be Tobias Meyer, who has been head of the mail and parcel business as a member of the Board in Bonn since 2019.
Appel’s previous contract runs until October 2022 and is now being extended by six months. According to Handelsblatt information, the Hamburg native should endeavor to be elected Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Deutsche Telekom in April 2022.
Meyer will take over the newly created Global Business Services department at Deutsche Post from July 2022, which will, among other things, take care of corporate development and communication, and is expected to become CEO from May 2023. The Austrian Nikola Hagleitner, previously Head of Sales at Post & Parcel Germany, will take over his previous position on the Board of Management on July 1, 2022.
Meyer, like his predecessors Appel and Zumwinkel in a previous life, a consultant at McKinsey, joined the company in 2013. Since then he has worked there as Head of Group Development, Chief Operation Officer at DHL Global Forwarding, Freight, as Head of Operations and IT in the Post & Parcel Germany department and, most recently, since March 2019 as Head of this department and member of the Executive Board.
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“With Tobias Meyer, a proven expert on the group takes over,” said Nikolaus von Bomhard, Chairman of the Supervisory Board. He is the “ideal cast to successfully continue the course that has been taken”.
There has long been speculation about Appel’s withdrawal
Appel’s withdrawal comes as no surprise. Two years ago he had already indicated to the Handelsblatt that he might want to forego another term of office. The job is fun for him, Appel was vague, but he did not want to commit to a new application.
At that time, among the DAX companies, only Heidelcement leader Bernd Scheifele and Wirecard boss Markus Braun were longer in office than the doctor of neurobiology. Today Appel is the longest-serving, even though ten additional companies have been promoted to the Dax since then.
It had become more likely in the past few days that Appel could evade a service extension at the supervisory board meeting announced for Wednesday this week. The manager, who lives in nearby Königswinter, apparently agreed with Deutsche Telekom to take over the chairmanship of the supervisory board there from April 2022. The preliminary decision should be made in the coming week.
The fact that, in view of the short contract extension, he will now lead Deutsche Post and the Supervisory Board of Deutsche Telekom for twelve months at the same time, should cause trouble. Shareholder representatives had already announced protests in advance of the threat of overburdening.
The Post Manager is to become Frank Appel’s successor at the top of the group on May 4, 2023.
(Photo: Deutsche Post)
“We are critical of the duplication of offices,” said Ingo Speich, Head of Corporate Governance at the Deka fund company. “A chairman of the board of directors should not take over the chairmanship of the supervisory board of another group at the same time.”
The revised German Corporate Governance Code, which came into force in May 2020, recommends that current board members of listed companies should not chair the supervisory board of a listed company outside the group. At Appel, there is another supervisory board mandate at Fresenius Management SE.
The then Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche was stopped with a similar request in 2018. He was only able to take over the chairmanship of the supervisory board of the travel company Tui after leaving the Stuttgart-based automobile company, a year later than planned.
But the agreement that has now been reached is apparently in agreement with the federal government. Their representative Jörg Kukies, previously State Secretary in the Ministry of Finance and soon to be central advisor to Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz, is a member of Deutsche Post’s supervisory board. Rolf Bösinger, also State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of Finance, is a member of the Supervisory Board of Deutsche Telekom. Protests by the two state representatives on their supervisory boards against Appel’s double burden are not yet known.
Longest-serving CEO in the Dax
In 2002 Appel was appointed to the board of the Bonn-based logistics group. The recommendation came from the then chairman of the board, Klaus Zumwinkel, who, like Appel, had worked for the McKinsey management consultancy before he left the post. In February 2008, Appel replaced his mentor at the top of the company after Zumwinkel announced his resignation due to a tax offense.
The stock exchange reassured that Deutsche Post is taking its time to change its boss. The share lost just 0.1 percent by noon. At the Bonn-based Dax group, Appel not only made a name for himself as a strategist who invested in emerging business areas such as parcel delivery in good time, but finally said goodbye to the non-branch Postbank. Even more, the now 60-year-old turned out to be a skilled renovator.
Right at the beginning of his tenure, he organized the withdrawal from the then high-deficit domestic US business. After an expensive breakdown in the software changeover in the freight business, he also took over the management of the DHL forwarding division in 2015 – for more than a year.
In addition, when profits collapsed in German parcel shipping at the beginning of 2018, it was again Appel who for a long time personally took care of the legacies of the failed board colleague Jürgen Gerdes as head of the division. Only in spring 2019 did he hand over the division, which had meanwhile been trimmed back to efficiency, to fellow board member Tobias Meyer. “Deutsche Post is in a much better position today than it was when Appels took office,” summarizes industry expert Christian Cohrs from Warburg Research.
Melanie Kreis comes away empty-handed
On the boardrooms of powerful competitors, however, many had firmly expected that CFO Melanie Kreis would run for the top position – an assessment that was shared by analysts. “She is well known and well integrated in the capital market,” praised one of them, who does not want to be named.
Many also believed that the federal government, which holds 20.5 percent of the shares through the state-owned KfW, would support Kreis’ ascent to the top of the group. Born in Bonn, she once sealed the sale of Postbank to Deutsche Bank, has been on the board since 2014 and, like Zumwinkel and Appel, previously worked at McKinsey.
However, it remained unknown whether the 50-year-old daughter of a ministerial official even applied to the supervisory board for chairmanship.
The creative leeway that Appel leaves to his successor is limited. The outgoing CEO has recently taken care of that himself. In March 2021, Appel announced an expensive future strategy – and that for the next nine years.
Deutsche Post will invest seven billion euros in climate protection by 2030, he predicted the future course, around a third of what the group would generate as free cash flow in 2020. Appel also pledged one percent of the annual net profit to social projects. According to the will of the 60-year-old, some things should also change in management: at least 30 percent of management positions should be filled by women by 2025.
More: Post increases forecast again – record result expected.