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Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/05/06
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Subject: Re: [Leica] Herr Cohn, new Leica CEO. was A way of photographing and autofocus.
From: LEICAMAN56@aol.com
Date: Fri, 7 May 1999 01:36:45 EDT

Herr Cohn's last job was as CEO of a German furniture manufacturer.  He was 
with this company for 14 years.  Before that, he was with several high tech 
firms.  Apparently, he did quite well with the furniture company, helping it 
achieve world wide success.  He is definitely not a bean counter.
His mission is to make Leica a profitable company again.
He is shaking up things quite a bit at Leica.  A number of people will be 
laid off.  Several board members have been sacked.  According to reports here 
on the LUG by Bill Erfurth, the price of Leica's stock has doubled.  
Stockholders should be happy!
At the last PMA, I had the opportunity to meet him and discuss Leica's new 
direction with him briefly.  He gave me the impression that he is sincere and 
a fast learner.  He did not indicate to me how he plans to make the company 
successful and ensure its survival.  At that time (mid-February) he was very 
much in a learning mode about Leica as a camera and company.  It is my 
understanding that he is stressing accountability and a certain impatience 
with the old way of doing things.  I do hope he retains some of the "old 
ways" of Leica and Leitz, because the old ways weren't all wrong!  I do feel 
he understands how important the traditional M camera is to the past and 
future of the company.  I stressed to him my feelings that Leica cannot 
become a "me too" camera manufacturer.  If they lose what is special about 
Leica, that indefinable "Leicaness," then they are lost and will lose their 
reason for being.
I wish him well and I hope he is on the right track.

Bill Rosauer


7/10/2004 www.leica-camera.com/unternehmen/ir/organe/coenen/index
Members of the Board of Management are Hanns-Peter Cohn (Chairman), Ralf Coenen (Engineering) and Dieter Uckele (Finance, Logistics and Information Technology.

Ralf Coenen: Member of the Executive Board of Leica Camera AG

Ralf Coenen (born 1961) became a member of the Executive Board of Leica Camera AG, Solms, on 1st July 2000.In conjunction with the team of departmental managers, he is responsible for the operations of the company as well as its research and development activities.In addition to this, he is in charge of coordinating the working partnership with the company's partners in Asia and sales in Asia.

Coenen spent six years as a consultant for McKinsey & Company in Munich, before moving to the Carl Zeiss Group in Oberkochen as a business area manager in 1996.Here he was responsible for reorganising the company's photographic and film lens activities.He is a trained electrical fitter for communication equipment with a degree in physics, and has also completed his Master of Business Administration (MBA).

He is married with two children. 
Ralf Coenen (43), hitherto member of the Board of Management responsible for Engineering, Cooperations and Asian Sales, will become the new Chairman of the Leica Camera AG, Solms, as from January 1, 2005.
...
Simultaneously Ralf Coenen, whose previous responsibilities as a Board member had been Engineering and Logistics, had extended his field of activities, taking on responsibility for Sales in the important Asian market, and had thus prepared himself for his new tasks as Chairman of the Board of Management.

"Ralf Coenen, a trained communication broadcast equipment mechanic, a diploma'd physicist and a man with many years of practical experience, is the right person to be at the head of Leica Camera AG.His management knowledge, from his academic training as a Master of Business Administration (MBA), as well as from his activities as a consultant with McKinsey and as Head of the Photo and Film Lenses business division of Zeiss Group, has contributed to his qualification for the chief executive position since he joined Leica Camera in July 2000.Already today, the Company's organisational structure, with the business divisions Sports Optics, headed by Dr. Ulrich Ehmes, and Photography, headed by Mario Thurnherr, bespeaks Mr. Coenen's ideas", said Hanns-Peter Cohn describing his successor designate.
...
The Company's major technological cooperations, with the Matsushita Group for digital compact cameras, and with Imacon A/S (meantime merged with Hasselblad Group) for digital supplements to the Leica SLR and rangefinder systems, have been built up under the direction of Ralf Coenen.Nevertheless, Coenen doesn't see himself as a ‘Chairman with a digital focus': "At Leica, the centre of all efforts is the picture and the best possible quality of the picture - not its digital or analogue recording.We focus on the sports optics products and the cameras for silver halogenid film, with digital products as supplements to offer our customers broader possibilities of choice."

To spread the ‘active cult' surrounding Leica photography, Ralf Coenen intends to extend the Leica Academy, already successful in Germany, on an international scale, to continue the intense cooperation with professional photographers and to focus distribution activities more clearly."A good example is set by our Frankfurt dealer Foto-Hobby Rahn, who assembles under one roof a combination of Leica Shop, Leica Gallery and Leica Academy - a promising sales model starting in mid-October 2004."Coenen is preparing a reorganisation of sales in important Asian markets.

Leica sports optics with its binoculars, scopes and range measurement devices is characterised by a direct orientation towards the main sales areas, bird watching, nature watching and hunting.Here, innovations immediately result in customer benefits, for instance, the combination of the watching and range measurement functions in a single compact binocular."We will consistently make use of the opportunities offered by these markets and are currently working on innovations of various kinds", said Coenen.