Ferrostaal chops CEO Haefeli as sales slowdown bites

Restructuring at industry solutions supplier Ferrostaal announced last week have reached the top, with CEO Markus Haefeli leaving the company with immediate effect.

New CEO is Carsten Wendler, the company’s long time packaging segment general manager. Wendler has been general manager of Ferrostaal’s packaging division for more than a decade, and has been instrumental in establishing the packaging business. He started with Ferrostaal as business development manager in Australia in 1996.

In a supporting move Rayne Simpson moves to the position as general manager; he has been general manager of print and finishing, joining Ferrostaal in 2009.

Ferrostaal has struggled to find sales of its wide range of capital equipment in the last four years, although its Komori press line has seen recent success with half a dozen presses ordered.

It is this slowdown in sales that is blamed for the company’s recent restructuring, which has seen some of its engineers set up as self employed contractors, the loss of other staff including sales manager Iain Sim, and now the retrenching of Haefeli.

Haefeli has been CEO at Ferrostaal for seven years, virtually since the company set up under its own brand here, with manroland presses as its main press line. The Abu Dhabi Investment Corporation – the same group that owns English Premier league team Manchester City – took a controlling interest in the group, which is a diverse conglomerate with interests in various heavy industrial sectors. This led to the exit of manroland, but Ferrostaal quickly acquired the Komori agency from paper merchant CPI.

Ferrostaal says, “The senior management change allows the company to focus its Australian and New Zealand operation on supplying and servicing printing presses manufactured by Komori, a range of high-end bindery equipment, packaging products from Bobst and the FMCG packaging equipment division.

Along with his new role as managing director Wendler will continue his previous role as the country representative for the range of Bobst products and other packaging equipment. He says, “After meeting with the CEO of Ferrostaal GmbH and managing director of Ferrostaal’s Global Equipment Solutions earlier in the week, and discussing the long term vision of the group for this region and our business portfolio, it was a no brainer to take the job, to put this business on a long-term footing.

“It is important to have this enthusiasm and support from your shareholder to move forward and look into the future. It is clear that we continue to have core competence from sales to service in our company in this region on a sustainable level and that forms the basis to be a long-term successful company and a viable partner that supports our client base. We want our customers to be successful and only if they are successful we can share it with them.”

Commenting on Rayne Simpson’s new role Wendler says, “There is hardly anyone in our industry that knows the print and finishing business better than Rayne.”

Simpson has successfully managed the Komori business since drupa 2012 after re-establishing key bindery suppliers to the top position. “What Rayne achieved for Komori in such a short period of time since he took their product responsibility as general manager for print is second to none,” says Wendler. Simpson will also continue in his previous role and will manage Komori and Ferrostaal’s key bindery suppliers.

Wendler says, “We are also pleased to have the products and knowledge in our company that supports our thinking, which benefits our core stakeholder and the customer. We do not want to have a basket of products and be everything to everybody but we want to be excellent in what we are doing and better at that and that’s what we will concentrate on in the future. We have adjusted our portfolio accordingly and now look ahead to engage with our clients.”

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