Oettinger Davidoff AG Announces New Chairman & CEO

Hans-Kristian Hoejsgaard is out at Oettinger Davidoff AG.

The company announced that Hoejsgaard, its ceo, and Andreas Schmid, the chairman of the board, were no longer in their roles in a move described as “the ongoing rejuvenation of the operational management.”

Beat Hauenstein, who most recently served as coo of Oettinger Davidoff AG, is the new ceo and Domenico Scala has been appointed chairman of the board.

Hoejsgaard’s tenure at the company will be remembered as a busy one. Most notably, he oversaw the modernization of the Davidoff brand and the integration of the Camacho brand into the company’s overall portfolio.

Outside of Davidoff’s core business, the company was busy. It divested itself of Contadis AG, a logistics company that sold a wide range of non-tobacco products. In addition, the company set up joint ventures and independent distributors in large international markets such as China and Germany.

The company also built new production facilities in Honduras and Nicaragua, where it also acquired farms.

However, in the last year the company’s rampant expansion has notably cooled. Last year, the U.S.-based subsidiary laid off dozens of employees as part of cost-cutting measures brought on partially by regulatory costs.

Schmid had been the chairman of the company’s board since December 2007 and became a shareholder in 2014. At that time, he was described as being responsible for seeing the transition between generations in the family that own Oettinger Davidoff AG.

As for their replacements, Beat Hauenstein is no stranger to Davidoff. He’s been at the company since 2003, first serving as cio and then svp of global operations from 2008 to 2015.

Scala served as the ceo of Nobel Biocare, a Swiss dental implant company, and cfo of Syngenta, Europe’s largest crop chemical company. He is the chairman of Chairman of Basilea Pharmaceutica and BAK Basel Economics, president of BaselArea, member of the board of overseers at Tufts University and a member of the bank council of Basler Kantonalbank.

He is most noted for chairing FIFA’s Audit & Compliance Committee, but resigned last year in protest because he felt like the independent auditors were no longer free to be independent.