"We have a rock-solid starting position in Switzerland"

WW: Mr. Hofer, you became CEO of Affichage without any poster experience. What is easier now: selling posters or advertising space in newspapers?
Daniel Hofer: The basic mechanisms are the same. It is an intermedia competition for advertising money with clients and agencies - with different performance values and functionalities. There are also new aspects for me, such as street furniture and comprehensive logistics. It's an exciting and great job in the out-of-home market.

You want to restructure sales at Affichage. What does that mean in concrete terms?
With its various subsidiaries, Affichage Holding is the clear market leader in the out-of-home sector in Switzerland. We want to try to coordinate our comprehensive range of services even better in the future. The aim is to make it even easier for advertising clients and agencies to make cost-efficient and effective use of out-of-home media. To this end, we will optimize our internal processes and structures where necessary.

Measured against Affichage's total turnover, foreign business still accounts for around 15 percent. How much time are you currently investing in this?
We are in a challenging turnaround situation in our international business. It is therefore only natural that, as CEO, I should devote my personal working time to areas where there is an immediate need for action. Since taking up my position, I have therefore been primarily involved in international activities. This allocation of resources is also justifiable for the time being because we have a rock-solid starting position in Switzerland.

Are you present at all negotiations in the countries of South-East Europe?
Thomas Rainer, our new Head of International Markets, and I are currently spending a considerable amount of our working time in Greece, Romania, Serbia, Bosnia, etc. in order to be able to represent our interests directly on the ground.

Affichage still generated 45 million francs abroad in 2010. You want to sell everything except Serbia and South Tyrol by the end of 2011. If you succeed, how much foreign turnover will be left?
I don't want to specify today which branches abroad we will actually divest, where we might enter into joint ventures and which international operations we will keep. That would be too early. However, we can say with certainty that we will significantly reduce our foreign involvement. We will only remain where we can assume, based on current knowledge, that we will achieve good and sustainable results. This will involve a corresponding reduction in foreign sales.

Back to Switzerland: you worked at Publigroupe for 20 years, two other people on the new Affichage management team are also former Publigroupe employees, as is Robert Schmidli, who has been proposed for the Board of Directors. What can former P employees bring to the poster business?
Markus Ehrle, Daniel Strobel and myself came to Affichage Holding from the NZZ Media Group, having previously worked for Publigroupe in a variety of roles. However, I did not bring Mr. Ehrle and Mr. Strobel to us because they came from the NZZ Media Group or P, but because they have been very successful in media marketing for over 20 years. Marcel Seiler will also be joining us as our new Head of Human Resources, having worked for many years in HR management positions at Migros and ABB, among others. I am looking forward to working with the new management team, which is made up of excellent long-standing members of Affichage's management team as well as new external talent.

For his part, Mr. Robert Schmidli brings with him extensive sales, marketing and management experience from Xerox, Bertelsmann-Fachmediengruppe, LTV/Gelbe Seiten and Publicitas. He is certainly one of the highest-profile marketers in Switzerland. And this is in line with the new strategic focus on the local market.

Regarding the focus on the domestic market: where do you still see opportunities for growth? Back then, when Affichage entered the foreign market, it did so because Switzerland was becoming too small for competitive reasons.
Of course, Switzerland is a saturated, well-developed market with very intense intermedia competition. And we are the absolute market leader in all segments of the out-of-home business. Of course, there is not the same growth potential as abroad. On the other hand, we will undoubtedly always have the opportunity for organic growth through product innovations, digitization and other new offerings.

You have announced 43 new e-panels in stations for the current year: can you say more about this?
We will be installing these e-panels in Zurich, Bern, Basel, Lucerne, Lausanne and Geneva stations over the course of the summer in addition to the existing big boards. These are 2 square meter 82" LCD screens in full HD quality, a premium offering that will be installed in highly frequented locations with good lighting conditions. We will be investing a sum in the low single-digit million range for this. The new screens will increase the attractiveness of our medium and offer clients additional added value, as they can be booked on a daily basis and guarantee increased attention thanks to the animation in portrait format.