Kasper Rorsted brings intellectual curiosity to Adidas
Dane revived Henkel during 8 years as chief executive
As end-of-term reports go, Kasper Rorsted’s is not too bad. When the news broke on Monday that the 53-year-old Dane was leaving Henkel to become the new boss at Adidas, Henkel lost €1bn of its market value. Adidas gained a similar amount.
It is not hard to see why. During his eight years as chief executive, Mr Rorsted has revivified Henkel, pushing up revenues, driving further into emerging markets and improving margins. Under his stewardship, the German consumer goods group’s market capitalisation quadrupled to more than €36bn.
Investors in Adidas — which has lost ground against its arch-rival Nike in the battle for domination of the global sportswear market — are hoping that Mr Rorsted can pull off the same trick again.
“He’s an optimizer, which is just what they need,” says one investor. “And he’s a doer. He’s not someone who spends ages sitting around strategising.”
On the face of it, the multilingual Mr Rorsted and the world’s second largest sportswear company are a good match. The dynamic manager — who played handball for Denmark’s national youth team — is a keen athlete, who skis frequently in winter, and starts each day with an hour of running or in the gym.
He is also a passionate fan of Bayern Munich, Germany’s most successful football team, which just happens to be sponsored — and part-owned — by his future employer.
Another bonus is that moving from Henkel’s home in Düsseldorf to Bavaria — Adidas is headquartered in Herzogenaurach — will bring Mr Rorsted closer to the family home in Munich, where his wife and the younger two of his four children are based.
Picking a chief executive from a different industry is not without risks, as many companies have found to their cost. But Mr Rorsted has managed to switch sectors before.
After studying in Copenhagen and at Harvard Business School, he spend his early career in technology. He did stints at Oracle and Compaq and became Hewlett-Packard’s managing director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, before being let go by then chief executive Carly Fiorina.
The episode was a rare blip in a largely seamless rise. Within a month of leaving HP, Mr Rorsted had 11 job offers from tech companies — and one from Henkel. He took the latter’s offer, because he could see a clear path to the top job, and set about getting to know his new company.
His grand tours of Henkel’s businesses around the world as he sought to understand the industry became the stuff of company legend. On one trip he spent five weeks on the road in China; on another, six weeks in the US.
People who know him say the son of a university professor has huge intellectual curiosity. “At business reviews he’s like a machine,” says one colleague. “He just fires off question after question after question.”
Insiders at Henkel suspect that this intellectual restlessness may have spurred him to join Adidas. Outsiders see it as a natural move after eight years in charge, especially after Henkel’s interest in Procter & Gamble’s haircare business was trumped last summer by Coty’s bid for P&G’s beauty assets.
Five days on from the announcement of Mr Rorsted’s move, Henkel’s shares have largely recovered their lost ground. Adidas’s investors will be hoping that Mr Rorsted’s boost in their company’s shares is more enduring.