Following the Annual General Meeting, Deutsche Post will receive a new CEO on Thursday.
(Photo: dpa)
Bonn It took exactly two hours and two minutes on Thursday in Bonn’s World Conference Center for Deutsche Post shareholders to hear the voice of their future CEO for the first time. After three more minutes, the lecture by Tobias Meyer, who will take over the top position in the Dax group after the general meeting, was over again.
With commonplaces such as the commitment to climate protection and e-commerce, the statements on the future corporate strategy remained correspondingly clear. The most concrete thing investors learned from their new CEO was that he wanted to continue to spend a lot of working time in the group’s companies.
“Where’s Mr. Meyer?” Shareholders had previously called out, uncomprehending. One asked, could the new CEO deviate from the long-decided “Strategy 2025” at all, “or does he have to execute it?”. The answer came – not without irony – from Meyer’s predecessor, Frank Appel, who was in office until the AGM: Of course, his successor has a free hand if the supervisory board plays along, the 61-year-old explained. Appel has been chief supervisor at Deutsche Telekom for a good year.
The fact that the CEO, who is stepping down after 15 years in office, formally had the right to speak at the annual general meeting, he had stipulated himself. At the end of 2021, the supervisory board had already appointed Meyer, who was then a post and parcel board member, as Appel’s successor. Appel himself had the contract extended by another year and a half, until after the 2023 Annual General Meeting.
His successor is “better and different than himself,” Appel has praised his crown prince several times since then. So far, however, it has not been possible to check this, because Meyer avoided the public, and he rejected requests for interviews. “No one is interested in a hectic profiling,” he said on Thursday in Bonn.
>> Read also: Appel’s long shadow – what the Post-Bilanz has in store for the new CEO
In fact, the new CEO starts with a penalty. The “Post & Paket Deutschland” division, which he headed until mid-2022, stood out as the only one of the five group divisions to completely miss its earnings targets. Instead of the targeted 835 million euros in operating profit after capital costs, Meyer and his successor, letter boss Nikola Hagleitner, only delivered 582 million euros. While all other division heads received annual bonuses from their individual results, Meyer – together with Hagleitner – got nothing in his division.
Meyer has taken over from Appel several times at the post office
And Meyer believes the Dax company is only capable of operating profits of six to seven billion euros this year. Predecessor Appel – despite Corona and the Ukraine war – brought it to 8.4 billion euros last year.
The 47-year-old new CEO, married and father of three children, joined Deutsche Post from the consulting firm McKinsey, as did Appel and his predecessor Klaus Zumwinkel. In 2013 he became Head of Group Development there, and two years later he moved to the DHL forwarding division as Chief Operating Officer (COO).
>> Read also: Katrin Suder should Control Deutsche Post
Meyer knew how to distinguish himself there by replacing the “New Forwarding Environment (NFE)” IT project, which failed with losses in the three-digit million range, with a functioning system. Head of the division at the time was Frank Appel himself, who had taken over the management there on an interim basis after Roger Crook, the forwarding director, was thrown out.
From 2018, Meyer helped clean up the run-down letter and parcel division again. And there, too, Appel had temporarily taken over the management, later handing over the office to Meyer after successful restructuring.
The pattern was repeated when he moved to the top of the group. In mid-2022, Meyer relinquished responsibility for his previous division to take over some of Appel’s previous responsibilities, including corporate administration and the Global Business Services unit.
It remains to be seen whether the closed industrial engineer and mechanical engineer will also master the job of motivating employees and inspiring customers as CEO.
More: Designated Post boss does not plan to change strategy