Dusseldorf Haniel boss Thomas Schmidt will leave the Duisburg family company. The supervisory board and the manager, who has been in office since mid-2019, decided by “mutual agreement” not to extend the contract, which runs until summer 2024. The almost 270-year-old company announced this on Friday.
The head of the supervisory board from the Haniel family, Maximilian Schwaiger, who has only been in office since May, stated that Schmidt had “managed to restructure our company from its foundations”. However, there were “different opinions about the implementation of the strategy” for the future. A new CEO should now be found in a “structured process”.
The 51-year-old Schmidt succeeded Stephan Gemkow in 2019, who had put the company back on a solid footing since 2012, especially financially. The search was for someone who would develop a vision for the future of the family business, which was founded in 1756 as a coal business. That’s what Schmidt should do.
He focused primarily on the topics of climate protection, health and robotics. But the portfolio does not yet show a clear strategy. Haniel includes companies as diverse as the hygiene specialist CWS, the mattress retailer Emma, the security service provider Bauwatch and Optimar, a provider of fish processing systems, which is now only managed as a financial holding.
There are also investments in the start-up 1Komma5 Grad, which is driving the transition to CO2-neutral energy systems in private households, and in sustainable funds. Haniel also holds shares in the listed office supplies retailer Takkt and the electronics retailer Ceconomy. Overall, Haniel generated sales of 4.2 billion euros and a net loss of 133 million euros in 2022.
According to company circles, it would be right to implement the decision immediately. But the timing is delicate. After around 20 years, long-time CFO Florian Funck is also leaving the company. He will move to laboratory supplier Sartorius as CFO in April 2024. His successor, Henk Derksen, was announced just two weeks ago.
Supervisory Board Chairman Schwaiger, who has gained an overview of the portfolio companies over the past four and a half months, will not fill the vacant position of CEO himself. For more than 100 years, the company has been operationally managed by non-family managers in accordance with its statutes.
Derksen, who according to a confidant is considered a “crisis-proof CFO”, will not start at Haniel until October 1st. According to Haniel, he should “take over the management tasks on an interim basis”. The outgoing CFO should support Funck. The transition would be made easier by the fact that Derksen and Schmidt were a good fit for each other, according to company circles.
Thomas Schmidt, who previously worked at General Electric and the electronics manufacturer TE Connectivity, initially completely reorganized the hygiene specialist CWS at Haniel. So he recommended himself for the chairmanship of the parent company.
Schmidt is said to have broadcast “unrest and discontent”.
Haniel had hired Schmidt as a change manager. In fact, company circles say that he has thoroughly tackled the “encrusted structures” in the group. A long-time companion judges that he was the “cultural change personified”, that he dismantled hierarchies and brought transparency, future orientation and a culture of mistakes into the company. The holding company has been significantly reduced in size and streamlined.
The diversity of the management team at Haniel has also increased significantly under his leadership. The Haniel boss was able to announce in the spring that 50 percent of managers are now female. Not only many family businesses are far away from such values.
But the manager did not succeed in bringing calm and stability to the organization he had newly established, say insiders. Schmidt expressed unrest and also dissatisfaction with the progress: “Top people that he had recruited himself left the company,” says the long-time companion. Another company expert explains: “Now there has to be stability, no organization can withstand more than three years of change.”
Just a week ago, Schmidt declared at an event that he wanted to “accelerate transformation” at Haniel. Now he can no longer drive forward the change demanded by the shareholder family himself.
The successor should implement the “vision of the ability to have grandchildren”.
Haniel sees itself as a so-called family equity company, meaning that it invests in companies over the long term as a family investor. The group has been fond of using the term “grandchildren-able” for years. That is the better word for sustainability, namely paired with financial success, explained Schmidt at the aptly titled “Enkelcapable Summit” on the company campus in Duisburg.
He wants to prove that sustainability and making money work together. “Without scaling, there is no impact,” he said on stage. When the 2022 annual figures were announced at the end of March, Schmidt announced: “We want to show that sustainable business models are not only profitable, but even perform better in the long term than non-sustainable business models.” His successor must now provide this proof.
The task for him or her is to continue the vision of “grandchildhood” with a focused portfolio. There is a lot of potential in the subsidiaries and investments, but there is a lack of implementation of the strategy, according to company circles.
More: Former Haniel chief controller Doreen Nowotne joins Kühne Holding