Joe Kaeser

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Joe Kaeser (2014)

Joe Kaeser (born June 23, 1957 as Josef Käser in Arnbruck , Lower Bavaria ; officially Josef Kaeser ) is a German manager . Between 2006 and 2013 he was CFO of Siemens . He has been the Group's CEO since August 1, 2013 .

Live and act

After studying business administration at the University of Applied Sciences in Regensburg , Kaeser joined Siemens in 1980 in the components division , where he took on various commercial management positions in the following years - including in the Siemens component business in Malaysia (1987–1988). In 1990 he was given commercial management of the Opto Semiconductors division. From 1994 Kaeser served as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer and later as CEO of the US subsidiaries Siemens Components, Cupertino , and Siemens Microelectronics , San José . He has called himself Joe Kaeser since his stay in the USA.

In 1999, Kaeser was assigned the task of setting up a new, group-wide system for performance controlling in the Group's central finance department. During this time, in the run-up to the listing in New York , he was jointly responsible for converting Siemens' global accounting to US-GAAP .

From April 2001 to September 2004 Kaeser was a member of the IC Mobile division and Chief Financial Officer of the division. On May 1, 2006, Kaeser succeeded Heinz-Joachim Neubürger as the Group's CFO in the position of Head of Corporate Finance when he left the company in the wake of the bribery scandal . Kaeser was also accused of complicity and tolerance of the years of bribery practices in the Siemens group. However, he protested his innocence and was never prosecuted.

On July 31, 2013, the Supervisory Board of Siemens AG elected him to succeed Peter Löscher as CEO of the company. He took up the post on August 1, 2013. Kaeser has been a member of the Supervisory Board of Daimler AG since 2014 . At the 2019 Annual General Meeting, he was re-elected as a member of the Supervisory Board for a further five years. Kaeser decided in mid-March 2020 to vacate Siemens’s CEO position to move to the top of Siemens Energy .

Kaeser is a member of the Trilateral Commission in Europe. From June 11th to 14th, 2015 he took part in the 63rd Bilderberg Conference in Telfs- Buchen in Austria .

Positioning and criticism

In the past, Kaeser has positioned itself on questions of morality and politics like seldom a German manager, which aroused a controversial echo. Even with his behavior as Siemens boss, he sometimes met with public criticism.

In March 2014, shortly after the Crimea was annexed by Russia , Kaeser traveled to Moscow and met Vladimir Putin there . Norbert Röttgen ( CDU ), Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Bundestag , said: “Kaeser's approach shows that he either did not understand the geopolitical significance of the crisis or that he understood the individual interests of his company over the interests of not just Germany, but Europe and the throughout the West. "

In the debate about the unconditional basic income (UBI), Kaeser pleaded for the introduction of such a system and warned of social tensions caused by digitization .

Kaeser 2017 with Ivanka Trump

In November 2017, Kaeser announced the reduction of 6,900 jobs at Siemens, around half of them in Germany. This has been criticized many times. In May 2018 it became known that the plant in Erfurt would not be sold and the Görlitz and Leipzig sites would not be closed.

In 2018, the Siemens boss expressed himself as a supporter of Donald Trump's tax reform for companies. After Alice Weidel ( AfD ) had spoken of “knife men” and “headscarf girls” in a Bundestag debate, Kaeser tweeted in May 2018: “Better ' headscarf girls' than ' Bund Deutscher Mädel '. With her nationalism, Mrs. Weidel is damaging the image of our country in the world. There, where the main source of German prosperity lies. ”Thereupon there were threats of violence against him, his family and those around him. However, there should not be a spiral of silence and the public discussion should "not be left to populist national statements". Kaeser is also of the opinion that "without an immigration law, the republic will not regain control."

When, after the unexplained disappearance of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, international representatives from business and politics canceled their participation in a planned investor conference in Riyadh , Kaeser - who is a member of the conference's advisory board - kept his participation open until the end. A week before the meeting, Kaeser said in Toronto: “If we stop communicating with countries where people are missing, I can stay at home right away.” He was then supported by Norbert Röttgen and FDP politician Bijan, among others Djir-Sarai criticized. Even Alexander Graf Lambsdorff (FDP) called on the German economy, as long as not to support the investor conference in Riyadh, is clearly elucidated the case Khashoggi. On the day before the conference began, Kaeser finally canceled his participation and described the killing of Khashoggi, which had meanwhile been granted, as "barbaric". He considers the official declaration of Saudi Arabia that it was an accident to be "hardly credible". The reason for his hesitation is said to have been a billions in the amount of a contract ready to be concluded, the completion of which would have secured thousands of jobs in the Siemens energy technology division.

In the debate about Sea Watch 3 captain Carola Rackete , Kaeser expressed solidarity with the sea ​​rescue workers via Twitter at the end of June 2019 .

On January 10, 2020, Kaeser surprisingly offered climate protection activist Luisa Neubauer a seat on the supervisory body for environmental issues of the planned Siemens subsidiary Siemens Energy (some media incorrectly reported a seat on the “ Supervisory Board ”). Neubauer had previously criticized Siemens for aiming for climate neutrality by 2030 and still supporting a project that will continue to mine coal in Australia for decades. Neubauer rejected Kaeser's offer. Climate activist Greta Thunberg also got involved and urged her followers to urge Kaeser's company to withdraw from the Australian coal business.

literature

  • Shaping the future. The Siemens entrepreneurs 1847–2018. Published by the Siemens Historical Institute, Hamburg 2018, ISBN 978-3867746021 .
  • Caspar Busse: Under power. Joe Kaeser does business and politics for Siemens. And sometimes - as in the Alstom case - both together. The story of a man from the Bavarian Forest who has an idea of ​​the world. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , April 29, 2014, p. 3.

Web links

Commons : Joe Kaeser  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Passauer Neue Presse , August 5, 2013, page 3 (interview with Joe Kaeser).
  2. ^ Siemens affair: allegations against CFO Kaeser. In: Spiegel Online , January 23, 2007, accessed October 24, 2018.
  3. ↑ Dana Heide: Now comes a “real Siemensian”. In: Handelsblatt , July 31, 2013, accessed on October 24, 2018.
  4. ↑ Löscher successor: Supervisory Board elects Joe Kaeser as the new Siemens boss. In: Spiegel Online , July 31, 2013, accessed on the same day.
  5. ↑ daimler.com: Annual General Meeting 2019
  6. ↑ Dinah Deckstein: Joe, the Brutal . In: Der Spiegel . No. 14 , 2020, p. 75 ( online - March 28, 2020 ).
  7. ↑ List of members of the Trilateral Commission (PDF; 284 kB), as of 2015.
  8. ^ A b Christoph Schäfer, Georg Meck, Tim Kanning: Deutsche Bank boss cancels trip to Saudi Arabia. In: FAZ , October 19, 2018, accessed on the same day.
  9. ↑ Quoted from Matthias Naß : Slime is a matter for the boss. In: Die Zeit 1/2018, January 31, 2018, accessed on October 19, 2018.
  10. ↑ Max Hägler: Siemens boss pleads for a basic income. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , November 20, 2016, accessed on October 24, 2018.
  11. ↑ Siemens wants to cut 6,900 jobs worldwide. In: Die Zeit , November 16, 2017, accessed October 19, 2018.
  12. ↑ Anne Hähnig: Has populism triumphed here? In: Zeit im Osten No. 23, May 30, 2018 (online version: June 3, 2018, accessed October 19, 2018).
  13. ↑ Siemens boss defends his praise for Donald Trump. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , February 3, 2018, accessed on October 24, 2018.
  14. ↑ Gerhard Hegmann: Siemens boss sees himself left alone in the fight against the AfD. In: Die Welt , July 10, 2018, accessed October 19, 2018.
  15. ↑ Case Khashoggi: FDP politician calls the behavior of Siemens boss Kaeser "irresponsible". In: Spiegel Online , October 19, 2018, accessed on the same day.
  16. ↑ Florian Diekmann, Dinah Deckstein: Siemens boss Kaeser and the Khashoggi case: Rejection with side effects. In: Spiegel Online , October 22, 2018, accessed on October 23, 2018.
  17. ↑ Has Siemens missed an order worth billions in Riyadh? In: FAZ , October 23, 2018, accessed on October 24, 2018.
  18. ↑ Sea rescue. Debate on the net: Can the Siemens boss support Carola Rackete? , derstandard.at of July 3, 2019
  19. ^ Siemens: Meeting with Luisa Neubauer was not a "PR gag" according to Joe Kaeser. Retrieved January 26, 2020 .
  20. ↑ DER SPIEGEL: Siemens boss Kaeser offers Luisa Neubauer a seat on the supervisory board - DER SPIEGEL - Economy. Retrieved January 27, 2020 .
  21. ↑ Georg Ismar, Lisa Ngyuen: Siemens boss offers Neubauer a seat on the supervisory board . Der Tagesspiegel, January 10, 2020, accessed on January 10, 2020
  22. ↑ DER SPIEGEL: Siemens boss Kaeser offers Luisa Neubauer a seat on the supervisory board - DER SPIEGEL - Economy. Retrieved January 10, 2020 .
  23. ↑ Construction of coal mine: Thunberg increases the pressure on Siemens , n-tv, January 11, 2020, accessed on January 14, 2020
personal data
SURNAME Kaeser, Joe
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cheesemaker, Josef
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German manager
DATE OF BIRTH June 23, 1957
PLACE OF BIRTH Arnbruck