Dormakaba: Sabrina Soussan to be new CEO as of 2021
Sabrina Soussan will be appointed CEO of the Dormakaba Group at the beginning of April 2021. The 51-year-old will succeed Riet Cadonau, who will in future focus on his function as Chairman of the Board of Directors.
The future CEO of Dormakaba, Sabrina Soussan, spent years in the service of the industrial group Siemens. There, the manager has been Co-CEO of Siemens Mobility, the provider of transport solutions based in Munich, since 2017. Soussan held various management positions in the areas of mobility, building technology and automotives at Siemens.
Career started as an engineer
Soussan began her career in 1994 as an engineer in propulsion research and development at the Renault automotive group in Paris. A French and German citizen, she reportedly holds a master's degree in mechanical and aeronautical engineering from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Mécanique et d'Aéronautique (ENSMA) and an MBA from the Universities of Poitiers and Dublin.
The future Dormakaba CEO has been a member of the Board of Directors of ITT Inc. since 2018 and a member of the Board of Directors of Schaeffler AG since 2019. Sabrina Soussan will take over the CEO function at Dormakaba as of April 1, 2021. The company, which is active in the security sector and has around 16,000 employees worldwide, generated consolidated revenue of CHF 2.8 billion last year.
Soussan succeeds Riet Cadonau, who has been CEO of the Group since 2011. Cadonau will focus on his role as Chairman of the Board of Directors next year following his re-election at the upcoming Annual General Meeting on October 20, 2020.
Changes in the Board of Directors
As announced in September 2019, Rolf Dörig, a member of Dormakaba's Board of Directors since 2004 and Vice Chairman from 2006 to 2018, had decided to step down from the Board at the next Annual General Meeting. All other BoD members would stand for re-election for a further term of one year, in addition to Riet Cadonau as BoD Chairman Hans Hess as Vice Chairman and Lead Independent Director.
The board of directors proposes John Liu as a new member. He is a Singaporean citizen and a recognized expert in the field of digital technology with extensive knowledge of Asian markets, the statement said. Over the course of his career, John Liu has held various leadership positions at digitally focused companies, it said: He was president of Google in China from 2008 to 2013 and held senior leadership positions at Internet company Qihoo 360 from 2014 to 2015 and Wanda Internet Technology Group from 2016 to 2018. He was also an independent non-executive director of London-listed ARM Holdings from 2014 to 2016, and has been a non-executive director of Hong Kong-listed Digital China Holdings Ltd since 2014. John Liu holds a PhD in Traffic Engineering & Network Management from the Technical University of Denmark and a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Beijing Normal University.
Source: Dormakaba
