Daimler AG Chief Financial Officer Bodo Uebber will leave the maker of Mercedes-Benz luxury cars, marking the first top-level departure after the German manufacturer picked Ola Kallenius to take over as chief executive officer next year.
Uebber, 59, informed supervisory board chairman Manfred Bischoff that “he is not seeking to extend his current appointment,” Daimler said in a statement late Sunday. It didn’t provide a reason for the planned departure.
Uebber’s contract expires in December 2019. He joined Daimler’s management board in 2003 and took over responsibility for finance a year later.
The management change comes at a critical time for the world’s bestselling luxury-car maker and biggest producer of commercial vehicles by revenue. Uebber has been one of the key architects behind Daimler’s new group structure, which was created to give its cars, trucks and mobility-services units more independence. Shareholders are set to vote on the changes at the annual general meeting in May next year.
Daimler’s veteran CEO, Dieter Zetsche, last week defended the strategic logic behind the biggest corporate overhaul in a decade. He told reporters in Paris that the proposed revamp should boost efficiency and help to eventually turn around a stock slide that’s erased a fifth of the company’s value this year.
Investors have balked at the new structure and called for deeper changes, including separate listings of the trucks division or parts of the mobility-services operations. Daimler officials have denied plans for a complete divestment of any subsidiary but left the door open for a partial sale. The overhaul has also been criticized for its cost, earmarked at around 1 billion euros ($1.2 billion) and for having too little instant benefit to the company’s valuation.
Uebber was seen as a candidate to lead a holding company that bundles the three separate Daimler units. But the supervisory board’s decision last month to give Kallenius, 49, the same dual responsibility that Zetsche currently has as CEO and head of the Mercedes-Benz cars unit indicated this scenario was unlikely to materialize.
By: Bloomberg
Source: Fortune
The survey and analysis of over 700 line managers and 500 HR professionals, explored confidence levels of line managers in dealing with ER issues, finding that line managers regularly lean on HR departments for help when dealing with Employee Relations matters.
Artificial intelligence continues to reshape industries across the globe. The executive search and leadership consulting profession is no exception. The industry stands poised for transformation. John Collins, Ph.D., a FinTech pioneer and founder of Deep Vertical AI, believes AI will not replace human practitioners, but rather will empower them in new and exciting ways.
Do you have a sense of how many people in your organization regularly use AI? Whatever you are thinking, the number is likely much higher — and the contexts might surprise you. Whether your employees use it as a research assistant, a writing aide, an image generator or a coding tool, the AI transformation of your organization is already underway.
