Translated material
Lesher will try to cure Siemens
The new boss will not shave the concern's head
An extraordinary meeting of the Siemens board of directors brought sensational news about a change in the management of the concern . From July 1, the post of chairman of the board will be taken over by 49-year-old Austrian Peter Löscher. Until now, he was quite far from electrical engineering and electronics, the main profile of Siemens. Currently, Mr. Lesher heads the Global Human Health sector at the American pharmaceutical concern Merck & Co. His last name, by the way, means “extinguisher.”The current head of the concern, Klaus Kleinfeld, leaves this post voluntarily. For several months now, a “fire” has been blazing on the highest floors of the concern - a scandal erupted due to Siemens’ unaccounted finances, secret accounts, bribes to partners and its own trade unionists. All this amounts to over 400 million euros. One of the oldest German industrial enterprises did not find a new head in its own ranks, so they had to invite a Varangian. “It is a difficult task to get Siemens out of its current situation and to ensure a good future for it with Lescher in good hands,” says Gerhard Kromme, head of the Siemens supervisory board. Mr. Lesher himself said that the different profile and incomparably larger scale of the new position would be an “extraordinary challenge” for him.
It seems that with the appointment of Lescher, the Siemens leadership crisis, which, along with the corruption scam, shook the management echelon of the concern, ended. A few weeks ago, the supervisory board expressed its lack of confidence in Klaus Kleinfeld. From then on, heated discussions began about his successor, until Mr. Kromme, to everyone’s relief, announced that in the person of Lesher they had managed to attract an “outstanding personality” to the concern.
The largest German trade union, IG Metall, also spoke out in favor of the Austrian. His representative Berthold Huber, as he himself noted, is especially impressed by the promise of the future head of Siemens “not to pursue a policy of shaving the head either in Germany or anywhere else,” and also to involve the workforce in making fundamentally important decisions. The trade union leader made it clear that “the management crisis has thus been overcome.”
Peter Lescher, fluent in three languages and even speaking Japanese, has made a name for himself in the global industry, but is almost unknown in Germany. Since 1988, he worked for almost 12 years in different countries at the Frankfurt chemical and pharmaceutical concern Hoechst - in the USA, Spain, Great Britain and Japan. In 1999, after the merger of Hoechst with Rhone-Poulenc to create the Aventis concern, Mr. Lescher, a father of three, educated at Harvard and Hong Kong, remained at this enterprise for two more years. In 2002, he moved to the British pharmaceutical concern Amersham, and after its takeover by General Electric, he became a member of the board of the new enterprise. A year ago, Mr. Lesher was invited to join the board of US pharmaceutical giant Merck. There he oversaw sales and marketing issues, leading a team of 35 thousand employees. At Siemens, where 470 thousand people work, the number of his subordinates will increase more than tenfold.