Warsteiner Brewery loses Managing Director after only one year
Warsteiner’s revolving doors keep on turning. After only 12 months on the job, Warsteiner’s Managing Director, Alessandra Cama, 51, handed in her resignation and will vacate her post in January 2019. She will be succeeded by Warsteiner’s CFO Christian Gieselmann, 47, who joined the brewer as recently as April this year. His predecessor on the job had lasted for less than a year. Warsteiner is now looking for a new CFO.
Warsteiner Brewery said that Ms Cama’s departure had been planned for a long time. She was to leave as soon as Warsteiner’s major restructuring programme was completed. Funnily, no one in Germany’s chatty brewing industry had been aware of this.
The frequent changes at the top underline that the privately-owned Warsteiner, ranked seventh among Germany’s top brewers, is in deep water. Volume sales have been declining for two decades ever since Warsteiner expanded brewing capacity to over 6 million hl beer annually. In 2017 it sold an estimated 2.1 million hl beer. Media reported that Ms Cama had been hired to devise and implement a corporate overhaul, which included 240 redundancies (out of 1,500 jobs) and the disposal of several unprofitable units.
As can be expected, employees did not take well to these changes. The redundancies and the announced sale of four distributors and the Herforder Brewery have led to unrest.
At the end of October 2018, Warsteiner Brewery announced that it has found buyers for three of its four distributors. However, it is still looking for an investor to take the struggling Herforder Brewery off its hands. Warsteiner acquired the Herforder Brewery in 2007. According to insiders, Warsteiner has given itself until February 2019 to clinch a deal.
