Jürgen Gerdes has to pay for disaster in the parcel business: Post fires Streetscooter boss

06/12/2018

Jürgen Gerdes has to pay for disaster in the parcel business Post fires Streetscooter boss

DPA

Had little with his innovations Fortune: Post Board Jürgen Gerdes (l.) Including mail deliverer Cindy Rexrodt and the Bad Hersfelder Mayor Thomas Fehling (non-party), along with delivery robot “PostBOT”.

The Deutsche Post praises its package board Jürgen Gerdes only on a neat other board position – to urge him out of the group two months later. The accompaniment sounds make the operation completely bizarre.

It was one of his biggest performances. At the end of May, Post Board member Jürgen Gerdes (53) inaugurated a new factory in Düren, Rhenish for the post-owned scooter Street scooter, together with the North Rhine-Westphalian Prime Minister Armin Laschet (CDU). Just two weeks later, the event looks like a premature farewell party. At the meeting of the Post-Supervisory Board on Tuesday Gerdes should be relieved of all duties and leave the company immediately. This was learned by manager-magazin.de from group circles. The company announced on early Tuesday eveningthat Gerdes resign from his position as Managing Director with immediate effect to leave the Group at the end of the month.

Gerdes must pay for a disaster that he has caused as a long-time chief of the core PeP (mail, e-commerce, parcels). As was announced in the past weeks in stages, the area needs to be rehabilitated, Instead of 1.6 billion euros in operating profit as planned, it will generate only 600 million euros this year. Post’s share price plunged sharply on Friday’s recent earnings warning.

The dismissal of Gerdes is extremely embarrassing for post office boss Frank Appel (57). In April, he had praised Gerdes as a successful manager and great innovator. “In our company, Jürgen Gerdes symbolizes entrepreneurial energy, innovative foresight and economic success. (…) With his experience, his energy and his entrepreneurial spirit, he will set decisive impulses for our Group in new business fields,” says Appel in the press release of 4 April,

At that time, Gerdes was initially deducted from the PeP -Ressort and the Innovation Board (“Corporate Incubations”) has been appointed, with responsibility for, inter alia, the electric light truck Street scooter.

In the Press release of June 12th Now only the new supervisory board chief Nikolaus von Bomhard has a say. He praised that Gerdes had “taken the first important steps in the two months of his work to set the course for the future of the company in the fields of digital, e-mobility and automation”. Nonetheless, the official justification for the abrupt departure was that they had “separated because of differing views on the strategic focus of the company”.

Even at the end of May at the factory opening, Gerdes, who has been working for Swiss Post since the age of 20, had even announced an IPO for the scooter. Now he has to retire completely.

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