The dialysis group Fresenius Medical Care (FMC) will be managed by a woman in the coming year.

Carla Kriwet will follow Rice Powell on January 1, 2023, as the Bad Homburg-based company announced late Tuesday evening.

Powell will retire from the board when his contract expires at the end of December 2022.

In addition, the contract of CFO Helen Giza was extended by another five years.

She will also take on the role of Deputy CEO.

According to the information, Kriwet was most recently CEO of BSH Hausgeräte GmbH.

Before that, she held management positions at Philips, Drägerwerk and Linde.

Rice Powell has been the CEO of the dialysis group listed in the leading German index Dax since January 2013.

He has been with the company since 1997 and was appointed to its board of directors in January 2004.

Fresenius Medical Care operates 4,100 dialysis centers for kidney patients and treats around 345,000 patients there.

In people with kidney failure, the blood must be regularly cleaned by dialysis.

At the same time, FMC is a leading supplier of products such as dialysis machines, dialyzers and related disposable accessories.

Profit slump in the first quarter

The dialysis group's profit fell by almost 40 percent in the first quarter - again due to high costs and the excess mortality of its patients in the pandemic.

This also overshadowed the start of the year for the parent company Fresenius.

In addition to the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, bottlenecks in the supply chains and, in some cases, significantly increased expenses also had a negative impact on the quarter, Fresenius announced on Wednesday in Bad Homburg.

Thanks to improvements at the infusion subsidiary Kabi and in the clinic business for the quarter, the group reported an increase in sales of eight percent compared to the previous year to around 9.7 billion euros, but the operating result (EBIT) adjusted for special effects fell by one percent to 996 million euros .

The bottom line is that Fresenius was able to compensate for the decline, with adjusted net income increasing by six percent to EUR 462 million.

The company did better than analysts had expected.

Both Dax companies are sticking to their forecasts for the current year.