Business-fixer moves up to KBA finance role
Jan 28, 2009 at 04:57 pm by
Staff
Helge Hansen, the man who restructured offset press maker Metronic after its acquisition by KBA in 2004, is turning his banking and econmic skills to the parent company.
The group’s supervisory board has approved a handover of the financial responsibilities previously held by president and chief executive Albrecht Bolza-Schünemann (56) from February 9. Hansen (61) had been managing director of Metronic for a year when it was sold to KBA.
A company statement says Koenig & Bauer – “along with the rest of the press engineering industry and most exporters” – has experienced a collapse in sales over the past year in the wake of the global financial and economic meltdown.
“The appointment of a new executive vice-president for finances to this SDAX-listed company – the world’s first and oldest press manufacturer – is a response to the mounting challenges posed by risk management, financial dealings with banks, and customer financing.” SDAX is the German stockmarket’s small-cap board.
When Bolza-Schünemann was appointed president and CEO of KBA in June 2003, finances were added to his existing responsibilities of product development and human resources at KBA’s sheetfed operation in Radebeul, near Dresden. The company says the transfer of his financial remit will give him more time to focus on the long-term strategic realignment of the entire KBA group in the international marketplace. This will entail a consolidation of the sheetfed division, which has been particularly hard hit by the global crisis.
Hansen has spent his entire career in finance, starting with an apprenticeship at Commerzbank in his home city of Hamburg. From 1988 to 1999 he headed the Feinfocus group, a mid-cap start-up with a number of domestic and foreign plants producing non-destructive radiography testing equipment.
Hansen first came into contact with KBA in June 2003, when he was appointed managing director of what was later to become KBA-Metronic. Prior to that, at the request of the lending banks he had successfully turned around a number of stricken businesses in the print media, construction and service sectors, a company statement says.
