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The industrial park is on the border between Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein.
There, in Norderstedt in the Gutenbergring, small businesses and medium-sized businesses sit side by side.
Hardly any visitor will suspect that behind the dreary concrete facade of Blume 2000 decisions will be made that affect the billion-dollar Beiersdorf Group.
But the coffee heir Michael Herz has loved this district on the outskirts for decades. It fits perfectly with the reticence of the shy billionaire who, together with his family, owns the Norderstedt florist, the book wholesaler Libri, the coffee company Tchibo and the majority of shares in Beiersdorf.
The fortunes of this enormous company fortune are directed by an elderly trio: These include 77-year-old Michael Herz, his 71-year-old brother Wolfgang and the lawyer Reinhard Pöllath.
The Munich specialist for family businesses, himself 73 years old, has been the decisive advisor and confidante of the brother couple since the breakup of the family at the beginning of the millennium.
Michael Herz recently handed over the position on the Beiersdorf Supervisory Board to his brother Wolfgang.
The head of the supervisory board is family lawyer Pöllath, who also holds this position in the family holding company Maxingvest.
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If these three gentlemen had already decided in the past few weeks to fill two important positions on the Beiersdorf Executive Board, the Chairman of the Executive Board will now be added.
Because already at the end of this week, the Belgian Stefan De Loecker will be replaced by the French Vincent Warnery in the head of the Nivea manufacturer.
The announcement said that they had “mutually agreed to terminate his executive board mandate by June 30th,” he said.
Warnery will start on May 1st.
The 53-year-old De Loecker has been in office for just two years, and no reasons are given for his departure.
However, it is known that the Herz brothers were not at all pleased when Beiersdorf dropped out of the Dax German share index in March after twelve years of membership and had to make room for Siemens Energy.
The business slump from the Corona year 2020 as well as hardly any effective countermeasures are likely to have been chalked up against the Belgian.
The future Beiersdorf boss Vincent Warnery
Source: picture alliance / dpa / Beiersdorf
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De Loecker lacks dynamism, according to the company.
Likewise, the transfer of responsibility to the regions and to the country managers, as promoted by sales expert De Loecker, should not have been well received by the Herz family.
Now the 52-year-old Warnery, who learned management at the cosmetics company L'Oréal and joined Beiersdorf's board of directors from the pharmaceutical manufacturer Sanofi in 2017, has a chance.
Since then he has been responsible for the Eucerin, La Prairie and Hansaplast brands as well as the North America region.
Through his years at L'Oréal, Warnery is used to centralized management, as the Herz brothers would like.
His contract was extended for five years to 2027.
With De Loecker's replacement, half of the Beiersdorf executive board will be filled within a few months.
Only at the beginning of the year was the 47-year-old CFO Dessi Temperley, who trained at Nestlé, replaced by Astrid Hermann.
The 47-year-old manager comes from the brand manufacturer Colgate-Palmolive.
Stefan De Loecker's contract would have run until 2023
Source: dpa
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The second departure concerns Marketing Director Asim Naseer.
The 51-year-old Pakistani had only come from Procter & Gamble to the Nivea manufacturer two years ago and has not extended the expiring executive board contract.
De Loecker then took over his duties in his jurisdiction.
It is said that Naseer was not up to the task of taking responsibility for the Nivea brand, which represents three quarters of the Group's consumer goods business.
Around 20,000 people work for Beiersdorf worldwide.
In the Corona year 2020, sales shrank by eight percent compared to 2019 to seven billion euros.
The group profit collapsed by 20 percent to 636 million euros.
However, business increased again by a good six percent in the first quarter of 2021.
This was mainly due to the success of the adhesive manufacturer Tesa - which belongs to Beiersdorf and is therefore another part of the family empire of the Herz brothers.
De Loecker's farewell, whose contract would have run until 2023, will not be quite as lavish as his predecessor.
At that time, the manager Stefan Heidenreich, who was CEO of Beiersdorf from 2012 to 2019, received total remuneration of a good 23 million euros for the 2018 financial year.
It was by far the highest earnings of the year for a DAX board member.
The total included a long-term bonus payment of 21 million euros, which Heidenreich had paid out for the past seven years.
Since then, the edgy Heidenreich from Kiel has been an investor and privateer.
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