A few weeks after leaving Infineon, the 66-year-old is to be elected chief supervisor at Knorr-Bremse.
(Photo: dpa)
Munich, Stuttgart Knorr-Bremse appoints Infineon CEO Reinhard Ploss as the successor to 78-year-old Klaus Mangold as Chairman of the Supervisory Board. “The change at the top of the supervisory board is planned for the long term,” said Mangold. “With his decades of expertise in managing an international high-tech company, Mr. Ploss is ideally suited to take on this responsible task for Knorr- Bremse AG.”
Mangold will resign his mandate at the Annual General Meeting on May 24th. Ploss doesn’t even allow himself a two-month break: the 66-year-old will stop at Infineon on March 31. The electrical engineer has always had great ambitions as head of Infineon over the past ten years, but led the Munich Dax group completely calmly.
He will urgently need his nature at Knorr- Bremse. Because the brake manufacturer, with sales of more than six billion euros, has seen many management changes in the past. Mangold’s era at the head of the supervisory board was not an easy task. He has headed the board since 2018.
Originally he wanted to retire a year earlier. After the surprising death of company patriarch Heinz Hermann Thiele about a year ago, Mangold complied with the request of the supervisory board and the Thiele family for continuity in the chairmanship of the supervisory board. His deputy on the supervisory board, Theodor Weimer, praised him for putting the well-being of the company ahead of his own personal plans for life.
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However, Mangold had to accept setbacks when it came to filling the top positions at Knorr- Bremse. First, the Munich group lost Klaus Deller in 2019 because of “different views of leadership and cooperation”. His successor Bernd Eulitz also only stayed until autumn 2020.
Mangold had chosen the ex-Linde manager himself. Then the death of the company patriarch in February 2021. And under the current CEO Jan Mrosik, who came from Siemens, there was turbulence. The head of the important commercial vehicle division, Peter Laier, left the group at his own request last October.
A lot of work for the quiet Ploss
Also at this year’s Annual General Meeting, Supervisory Board member Thomas Enders, 63, is resigning. The former EADS boss cites “other important obligations” as the reason. Enders sits on the Lufthansa Supervisory Board and is considered a potential candidate for the post of chief supervisor. Enders is also on the advisory board of the Lilium air taxi company. Knorr- Bremse has not yet named a successor.
So there is a lot of work ahead of Ploss. But the manager is used to troubled times. Even if analysts and investors were amazed when Infineon’s then chairman of the supervisory board, Wolfgang Mayrhuber, presented Ploss, the veteran, as the new boss in 2012. Mayrhuber had the right instinct: “In our dynamic and cyclical business, stability is a key success factor.”
Ploss started as a process engineer in 1986, when the company was part of Siemens. In 2000 he took over the management of the car division, and in 2007 he became a member of the board. Together with the then CEO Peter Bauer, he saved Infineon from bankruptcy. They made the decision to sell off divisions and concentrated on a few growth areas – the cornerstone of the upswing.
>>> Also read: Knorr boss Jan Mrosik is counting on growth – even without Hella
Ploss’ success rate speaks for itself. In the fiscal year that ended on September 30, Infineon’s sales increased by 29 percent to a good eleven billion euros. The profit has tripled to almost 1.2 billion euros.
And while some CEOs afford racehorses and sports cars, Reinhard Ploss lets model helicopters take to the skies. As precise as he is when using the remote control, he wants to control his company with the same precision. “What we promise, we keep” is one of those sayings he likes to dig out when doubts about his strategy arise again.
Just as he has managed Infineon for all these years, he is also managing the change at the top of the Dax group these days: without hectic and loud noises. Ploss hands over almost silently to a long-time companion, the production director Jochen Hanebeck. These are things that many in the Knorr- Bremse Group would also hope for from the personnel.
More: Infineon continues to grow – and warns of bottlenecks