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Leica Press Release
Ralf Coenen (43), hitherto member of the Board of Management responsible for Engineering, Cooperations and Asian Sales, will become the new Chairman of the Leica Camera AG, Solms, as from January 1, 2005. This decision of the Company's Supervisory Board, made in its meeting on Thursday, follows the proposal brought forward by Hanns-Peter Cohn (56). After six years on duty as Chairman of the Board of Management, Cohn will leave the Company at his own request to return to Vitra AG, Basle. At this manufacturer of high quality office and home furniture, he has already been active from 1984 until 1998 as one of three managing directors, with marketing and sales as his main field. As from January 1, 2005, Cohn will take on the position of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at the Swiss company.
Dieter Uckele (55) will stay on Leica Camera AG's Board of Management, which in the future will consist of two members.
This changeover has been prepared from a long-term perspective in cooperation with the supervising bodies of Leica Camera AG. For a transitional period, Dieter Uckele had been appointed third member of the Board of Management as from April 1, 2003. Simultaneously Ralf Coenen, whose previous responsibilities as a Board member had been Engineering and Logistics, had extended his field of activities, taking on responsibility for Sales in the important Asian market, and had thus prepared himself for his new tasks as Chairman of the Board of Management.
“Ralf Coenen, a trained communication broadcast equipment mechanic, a diploma’d physicist and a man with many years of practical experience, is the right person to be at the head of Leica Camera AG. His management knowledge, from his academic training as a Master of Business Administration (MBA), as well as from his activities as a consultant with McKinsey and as Head of the Photo and Film Lenses business division of Zeiss Group, has contributed to his qualification for the chief executive position since he joined Leica Camera in July 2000. Already today, the Company’s organisational structure, with the business divisions Sports Optics, headed by Dr. Ulrich Ehmes, and Photography, headed by Mario Thurnherr, bespeaks Mr. Coenen’s ideas”, said Hanns-Peter Cohn describing his successor designate.
The Company’s major technological cooperations, with the Matsushita Group for digital compact cameras, and with Imacon A/S (meantime merged with Hasselblad Group) for digital supplements to the Leica SLR and rangefinder systems, have been built up under the direction of Ralf Coenen. Nevertheless, Coenen doesn’t see himself as a ‘Chairman with a digital focus’: “At Leica, the centre of all efforts is the picture and the best possible quality of the picture – not its digital or analogue recording. We focus on the sports optics products and the cameras for silver halogenid film, with digital products as supplements to offer our customers broader possibilities of choice.”
To spread the ‘active cult’ surrounding Leica photography, Ralf Coenen intends to extend the Leica Academy, already successful in Germany, on an international scale, to continue the intense cooperation with professional photographers and to focus distribution activities more clearly. “A good example is set by our Frankfurt dealer Foto-Hobby Rahn, who assembles under one roof a combination of Leica Shop, Leica Gallery and Leica Academy – a promising sales model starting in mid-October 2004.” Coenen is preparing a reorganisation of sales in important Asian markets.
Leica sports optics with its binoculars, scopes and range measurement devices is characterised by a direct orientation towards the main sales areas, bird watching, nature watching and hunting. Here, innovations immediately result in customer benefits, for instance, the combination of the watching and range measurement functions in a single compact binocular. “We will consistently make use of the opportunities offered by these markets and are currently working on innovations of various kinds”, said Coenen.
Posted by Darren in our News category on October 09, 2004