Coloplast supports its long-term growth ambitions through a new organisational
structure, which will strengthen innovation, sales and marketing activities.
Coloplast's strategy towards 2012, “Investment in growth”, was announced in
November 2005 and Coloplast has taken several initiatives to increase the
company's profitability and hence free resources for growth initiatives.
Our competitive strength and growth opportunities rely not only on the
company's profitability, but equally on innovative skills and the strength of
our customer relations. We have therefore performed an analysis of our
activities in the areas of innovation, sales and marketing, which now leads to
the implementation of a new organisational structure with the aim to accelerate
growth. The new organisation will:
a) Strengthen the link between customer understanding, market insight and
product development
b) Efficiently channel resources into growth initiatives
c) Accelerate time-to-market, and free up resources to spend more time with
customers
d) Allow competence centre functions to obtain scale efficiencies, share skills
and prevent duplication
A new global organisation along functional lines will replace the three product
divisions and the six regional sales organisations will be replaced with four
regional and three large country sales organisations.
The key changes are:
a) Three new global units reporting to Executive Vice President and CCO Lars
Rasmussen: ‘Global Marketing, Global R&D and Commercial Excellence' will replace
the three product divisions
b) United Kingdom, Germany and France will report directly to the CCO, giving
greater freedom and flexibility in these significant markets
c) All other European countries will report to a new Region Europe creating
greater opportunities to share learning's and best practice
d) Region North America replaces Region Americas giving greater focus on the US
and Canada
e) A new Region for ‘Emerging Markets' has been established, to concentrate on
countries with high growth potential
f) Region Asia-Pacific remains unchanged.
The new organisation and key positions are shown in the chart in the attached
document.
The new organisation will be operational from 30 March 2007. As of 1 April 2007
Anne Mette Olesen, SVP of the Urology and Continence Care Division, will take
over responsibility for Corporate HR from Bente Laursen, who will continue to
work with Corporate HR tasks on a part-time basis.
The changes support Coloplast in achieving its long-term targets, but they do
not affect our expectations for 2006/07. The current segmentation in the
financial reporting will be maintained.
In connection with the implementation of the new organisation Coloplast has
decided to postpone the establishment of regional shared service centres and the
costs related to the implementation of the new organisation are therefore
included in the existing allocation to restructurings in 2006/07.
Potential redundancies, e.g. in connection with staffing of the Global R&D and
Global Marketing competence centre functions will to a large extent be offset by
new positions in other functions. Net savings related to the restructuring are
therefore negligible
Sten Scheibye
President, CEO
Further information:
Investors and financial analysts:
Jørgen Fischer Ravn
Head of Investor relations
Tel. +45 3085 1308
E-mail: dkjfr@coloplast.com
Press and the media:
Jens Tovborg Jensen
Head of Media relations
Tel. +45 3085 1922
E-mail: dkjto@coloplast.com
This announcement is available in a Danish and an English-language version.
In the event of discrepancies, the Danish version shall prevail.
