HERMA: New leadership in the Labelstock Business Unit

HERMA GmbH, headquartered in Filderstadt, Germany, completed a change in management as planned: Dr. Guido Spachtholz (47) replaced Dr. Thomas Baumgärtner, who is retiring, at the self-adhesive technology specialist on March 1, 2021. He is handing over to his successor as Managing Director and Head of the Labelstock Business Unit "after a 16-year growth and success story, an excellently positioned business unit that is regarded in the industry as a highly efficient innovation leader," says CEO Sven Schneller; and continues: "In addition to what we have achieved, I look back very gratefully on an extremely trust-based collaboration that has also enabled us to achieve and master the extremely ambitious goals and economic challenges of our time together in the company." Dr. Spachtholz will start familiarizing himself with his new role in January 2021 at the company's Filderstadt site, which has recently undergone further massive expansion.

Growing faster than the market
Dr. Baumgärtner joined HERMA in 2005 and, as Managing Director, took over the Labelstock division. He pushed the company's development into a technology leader with the aim of continuously growing faster than the market. "Having achieved this is also of enormous value for the further development of the company as a whole today," emphasizes Fritz-Jürgen Heckmann, Chairman of the HERMA Advisory Board. "The HERMA shareholders and the entire Advisory Board are extremely grateful to Dr. Thomas Baumgärtner for his very successful management on the one hand and for achieving sustainable technological benchmarks and efficiency on the other," the Advisory Board Chairman continued. The newly added production area, which will come on stream this year, will not only bring a further leap forward in innovation, but also a 50 percent increase in annual labelstock capacity to 1.2 billion square meters. Dr. Baumgärtner explains: "In all of this, it is particularly important to me that we have long been perceived as a particularly resource- and environmentally-oriented company: on the product side, by winning the German Packaging Award for Sustainability several times; in production, by reduced and optimized material use and significantly improved energy efficiency. This is also a decisive building block for the climate neutrality achieved from 2021. Having been part of the inspiring HERMA team in this holistic way - for that I am very grateful."

Acting more innovatively than the competition
His successor, Dr. Guido Spachtholz, who also holds a doctorate in engineering, was most recently a member of the management board of the Chiron Group, based in Tuttlingen, Germany, a specialist in CNC-controlled machining centers and turnkey manufacturing solutions. Previous stations of the native Rhinelander were Stama Maschinenfabrik GmbH as part of the Chiron Group and Alfred Schütte GmbH, a leading supplier of multi-spindle automatic lathes and 5-axis CNC grinding machines. "With his extensive experience in innovation-driven, international industrial business, Dr. Spachtholz will play a decisive role in shaping HERMA's strategic growth course and thus continue Dr. Baumgärtner's successful work," emphasizes Sven Schneller. Dr. Guido Spachtholz outlines his upcoming task as follows: "The good position in the self-adhesive materials business must be further expanded in a targeted and determined manner - through continuous optimization of all development and production processes as well as through impetus-giving internationalization. In any case, I'm looking forward to being able to act as part of the HERMA team in a way that is always a bit more innovative than the competition."