Hubert Burda hands over to his children

Elisabeth Burda Furtwängler and Jacob Burda will take over entrepreneurial and publishing responsibility for Hubert Burda Media from their father Hubert Burda on February 1, 2025. This was announced on Wednesday at the meeting of the Board of Directors of the internationally operating media group. This means that from next February, the fourth generation of the Burda family will steer the fortunes of the family business, which has been active in publishing since 1903.

Jacob Burda and Elisabeth Burda Furtwängler have been shareholders since 2010 and members of the Board of Directors, the Group's highest management body, since 2017.

Hubert Burda remains personally liable partner and honorary chairman

As part of the generational change, Hubert Burda will retire from the Group's Board of Directors at the end of January 2025, just before his 85th birthday. He will remain associated with the company, which he has managed with sole publishing responsibility since 1986 and expanded into an international media group, as a personally liable partner and Honorary Chairman of the holding company. At the same time, Paul-Bernhard Kallen, Chairman of the Board of Directors, will step down from this body and thus from responsibility for the Group. Kallen joined Burda in 1996 as Managing Director and in this role was responsible for the commercial division, the international publishing business and the entire technology division, including the Group's incipient digital transformation.

Olaf Koch will succeed Kallen as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Burda Group on February 1, 2025. He was CEO of Metro AG in Düsseldorf from 2012 to 2020. He is currently a member of the Supervisory Board of Mercedes-Benz Group AG and a partner and co-founder of Zintinus GmbH, a venture capital fund that focuses on promoting start-ups in the field of sustainable and healthy innovations in the food sector. The role of deputy to the future Chairman of the Board of Directors will be assumed by former Board member Andreas Rittstieg, who has been a member of the Board of Directors since 2017.

Ulrike Handel will also be appointed to the Board of Directors. She spent a total of twelve years at Axel Springer, most recently as a member of the Executive Board responsible for the European media business and digital companies such as Idealo and Awin until the end of 2022. Prior to that, she was CEO for the DACH region of the international agency group Dentsu. Today, she sits on the Board of Directors of the listed Norwegian media and e-commerce group Schibsted and on the Supervisory Board of the medical software company CompuGroup, among others.