LEONI 
The 52-year-old Dutchman succeeds Alexander Everke, who has been CEO of AMS for almost seven years, as the company announced on Monday evening. He had significantly expanded the sensor and lighting specialist from near Graz with the hotly contested takeover of Osram, but since then has only been able to halt the slide in the share price with difficulty. For Kamper, it is a return: before moving to Nuremberg, he had worked for Osram for 15 years in leading positions, most recently as head of the optical semiconductor division.
The Supervisory Board has appointed Kamper as Chairman of the Management Board and the change in leadership is to be completed in the course of the spring, AMS explained. Kamper will relinquish his position as head of Leoni at the end of March. He is to further develop the strategy, explained AMS-Osram Supervisory Board Chairwoman Margarete Haase. "His technological expertise and experience as a manager form an excellent basis for exploiting the opportunities arising from the combination of sensor and LED technology." He had already promoted MicroLED technology, which AMS relies on, at an early stage during his time at Osram. A companion of Kampers at Osram, Ingo Bank, announced in the fall that he would be stepping down as CFO of AMS Osram at the end of April.
The former Siemens and Infineon manager Everke had pushed through the more than four billion euro takeover of the much larger Osram against fierce resistance from the management. Numerous peripheral businesses of Osram have since been sold. During his time in office, he increased AMS's turnover tenfold, but he was never able to dispel analysts' doubts about its future success. The merged company is now only worth 2.3 billion euros on the stock exchange. AMS Osram is considered to be very dependent on its most important customer, Apple.
Kampers departure from Leoni came as a surprise. "I would have liked to have completed the restructuring of this promising company as CEO," he explained, but made it clear that the new task was a matter close to his heart. "I couldn't say no to that." Kamper has led Leoni for five and a half years. "Hired to manage the planned growth, he proved himself as a crisis manager," said Supervisory Board Chairman Klaus Rinnerberger, praising him. Soon after taking office, Kamper began to fundamentally restructure the manufacturer of cable harnesses and wires for the automotive and industrial sectors, which at the time had around 90,000 employees, because growth had gotten out of hand.
However, Leoni recently suffered another setback in the laborious restructuring process when the buyer for the cable business, the Thai Stark Corp, unexpectedly backed out. The proceeds from the sale were an important component of the restructuring concept. Now the crisis manager Hans-Joachim Ziems is back on the Management Board to secure the Group's financing. A successor to Kamper is being sought.
(Report by Alexander Hübner, edited by Birgit Mittwollen. If you have any questions, please contact our editorial team at berlin.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for politics and the economy) or frankfurt.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for companies and markets).
