Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

I have been Chief Exe­cu­tive Officer of Brenntag AG since January 2020 and would like to intro­duce myself to you today in the Annual.

I stu­died che­mi­stry in Munich and have spent most of my career so far in various manage­ment posi­tions at com­pa­nies in the che­mical industry. Among other roles, I have worked in rese­arch and deve­lop­ment, pro­duc­tion, sales, mar­ke­ting and exe­cu­tive manage­ment.

During my career, I have been lucky enough to live in the USA, Switz­er­land and China as well as in Ger­many and the­re­fore work with many dif­fe­rent people of dif­fe­rent natio­na­li­ties and cul­tures. And that is a good fit with Brenntag! For alt­hough our Group head­quar­ters are in Ger­many, around 90% of the work­force work out­side Ger­many. Our more than 17,000 employees rep­re­sent almost 100 dif­fe­rent natio­na­li­ties.

And that brings us full circle to the banner title of our 2019 annual report, “Fasci­na­ting Variety”. Brenntag is varied in a number of respects. The dif­fe­rent natio­na­li­ties of our employees, our full-line range of che­mi­cals and ingre­dients, our broad port­folio of ser­vices and the diverse array of indus­tries we serve with our pro­ducts and ser­vices demons­trate how varied our com­pany is. In this Annual, we would like to give you a closer insight into this variety by pre­sen­ting several examples from around the Brenntag world.

I am excited about the new tasks that we as a team at Brenntag will tackle. Brenntag is an out­stan­ding com­pany with a strong busi­ness model in a gro­wing market and great poten­tial for the future! Over the past few weeks, I have already inter­acted with a number of col­leagues, employees and custo­mers in our regions and gained some valu­able impres­sions. Our aim is to con­tinue Brenntag’s suc­cessful journey in che­mical dis­tri­bu­tion!

I am loo­king for­ward to working tog­e­ther with our busi­ness part­ners around the globe. Equally, I am loo­king for­ward to working tog­e­ther with my col­leagues on the Board of Manage­ment and our employees and to enga­ging in dia­logue with our inves­tors. Tog­e­ther, we will open a new chapter for Brenntag!