Spiesshofer, a German national, joins ABB from consultants Roland Berger where he was a senior partner and head of the Global Operations Practice. Before, he worked for consultants A.T. Kearney in Germany as well as Switzerland and was in the leadership team that established the firm in Asia and Australia. He concentrated on corporate and operations strategies, global value chain optimization, large scale cost and supply chain optimization as well as complexity reduction, with a special focus on Asia and Central Eastern Europe.
Fred Kindle, ABB President and CEO said: "Ulrich Spiesshofer's extensive experience will help ABB accelerate the implementation of our operational excellence program. He will manage the corporate strategy, supply chain management and mergers and acquisition functions at group level and we look forward to working with him on these and other strategic issues."
Spiesshofer joins the five other members of the Executive Committee: Kindle, Michel Demaré, CFO, Dinesh Paliwal, head of Automation Technologies division, Peter Smits, head of Power Technologies division and Gary Steel, head of Human Resources. Further changes, announced on September 6, will take effect on January 1, 2006.
Married with two sons, Spiesshofer lives in Zurich, Switzerland. He has a PhD in economics and a Master in business administration and engineering from the University of Stuttgart.
ABB (www.abb.com) is a leader in power and automation technologies that enable utility and industry customers to improve performance while lowering environmental impact. The ABB Group of companies operates in around 100 countries and employs about 103,000 people.
