Valora's Board of Directors has appointed Tobias Knechtle, a Swiss citizen born in 1972, as the Valora Group's new CFO. Tobias Knechtle will thus succeed Michael Mueller when he takes up his new duties as CEO on March 1, 2014.
Tobias Knechtle graduated from the University of Bern in Economics (lic.rer.pol.), specialising in Finance and Marketing. He began his professional career in 1995 as a corporate internal auditor with the Nestlé Group. Between 1999 and 2005 he carried out a number of different assignments, both as a consultant and a project manager, for The Boston Consulting Group in Brazil and Switzerland. The projects on which he was engaged were primarily focused on company development and operational optimisation in the consumer-goods and industrial-equipment sectors. In 2005, he joined Cinven Private Equity, a UK firm with headquarters in London, as a principal in the Frankfurt office and was made one of the managing directors thereof two years later. During his time with Cinven, Tobias Knechtle was also a member of the Board of Directors of Springer Science+Business Media, the world's second-largest scientific publishing house.
Since 2009, Tobias Knechtle has been working at the Kudelski Group, where he was promoted to Senior Vice President Finance in 2011. Key aspects of his activities at Kudelski have been the initiation and implementation of the 2011/12 restructuring programme, the supervision of a number of portfolio and structural changes and the enhancement of commercial and financial processes.
Tobias Knechtle will take up his new duties as Valora Group CFO on March 1 2014. Valora's Board of Directors is delighted to have appointed a candidate to this important position who is ideally qualified for the role. In the words of Rolando Benedick, Valora's Board Chairman, "We are convinced that in appointing Tobias Knechtle we have chosen an executive who will provide valuable support to our designated CEO, thus further strengthening Valora's management team.“
