175 years Lindt & Sprüngli

LINDT&SPRÜNGLI 24 This year you will also be celebrating an anniversary together with Lindt&Sprüngli. Since 1995, you have helped shape the success of the company in a managerial role. What is it that keeps you excited every day? There is no better responsibility than managing this unique company. The diversity of tasks, from the purchase of raw materials and their re- finement to marketing and sales (“bean to bar”) in our global environment, is incredibly broad and exciting. The most important factor, how- ever, is our employees and my colleagues. I am able to rely on long-serving experts that work as a team every day to put a great deal of motivation and commitment into pursuing one goal only: surprising our consumers time and time again with new sustainably produced and, above all, high-quality creations. You have served as CEO since October 2016 and can boast solid growth figures and continuous in- creases in profit. What is your recipe for success? The strong results of the last three years stem from the solid foundations laid over the last 25 years and earlier in terms of recipes, brand development, company structure, and cor­ porate culture. In addition to our values of trust, respect, and focus on shared ambitious goals, the excellent reputation of our company and its brands is the foundation that I am passionately developing and actively shaping together with almost 15,000 employees. For me, the team always comes first. Trust, respect and a focus on common ambitious goals are the basis for successful cooperation between the specialists in various positions. The open corporate culture I advocate, with its promotion For 25 years now: a focus on quality, innovation and employees of diversity and constant encouragement to bring in even uncomfortable opinions and take calculated risks, is a prerequisite for con- tinuing to successfully master the challenges of the future. What progress in the market segment “Rest of the World” are you particularly proud of, and what goals would you like to achieve with Lindt& Sprüngli in these countries with extreme potential in the future? Or, to put it another way, which countries do you see as being particularly exciting and why? In the last 10 years, Lindt&Sprüngli has founded new proprietary sales organizations in the five emerging markets China, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and Russia as well as in the devel- oped quality market Japan. All these markets have a large population and disproportionate growth in premium chocolate. With rising per capita income, chocolate consumption will also increase disproportionately in the emerg- ing markets in the future. The exciting chal- lenge in all markets is that our traditional con- cepts, which have been tried and tested in Europe and North America, have to be adapted to local conditions and requirements in terms of recipes, formats, sales and logistics through to advertising. Examples of the different ap- proaches are the joint venture to develop our Brazilian store concept, the launch of Lindor Matcha in Japan and the initial focus of the sales development in Russia on the cities Moscow and St. Petersburg. But what definitely remains unaffected is the consistently high quality of our products customers have come to expect. Sales in these markets will continue Passion Interview with Group CEO Dieter Weisskopf