It only took about a month and a half for Denmark’s GN Store Nord and its hearing device unit GN Resound to find a new Chief Financial Officer to replace Anders Boyer, as the group announced Wednesday it has hired German national Marcus Desimoni for the vacant position.

 “He’s a CFO with a great set of tools and a long history of working with capital markets, and he also has profound business acumen which will benefit our commercial agenda in the future. We have brought in a CFO who knows his business and by the way intends and is intended to be very close to our commercial decisions,” CEO of GN Resound, Anders Hedegaard, tells MedWatch.

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A little extra

Marcus Desimoni has a long background from German tech group Siemens where he has served as Head of Investor Relations and Chief Financial Officer for its hearing device unit. The unit was sold to private equity and renamed Sivantos in 2014 and Desimoni continued to serve as CFO of the company, working out of Singapore.

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“We went looking for someone from a research-oriented production company with international businesses who had gone through the ranks, and we narrowed it down to a field of extremely strong candidates,” Anders Hedegaard says and adds:

“There were some super-skilled people in the field of applicants from other industrial companies, and they might as well have won the job. But in Marcus we have the combination of a guy who’s very strong financially and in regard to IR, and who also has experience from the sector – so we get a little extra.”

Whereas the former CFO, Anders Boyer, is known as somewhat of a turnaround specialist and has been singled out as the driving force behind GN’s major turnaround, Marcus Desimoni will be focusing more on growth.

“Our company’s agenda is to outgrow the market and make good on what we have promised, so we have a very clear commercial agenda to take market shares, and it’s a massive task to push the company even further in that direction,” he says, adding:

“There’s a big difference between pulling off a turnaround – with all due respect for that task – and growing a company and getting that growth agenda under the skin of our organization. That’s what we have to do now and are in the process of doing, and Marcus will be part of that.”

Short recruitment process

When Anders Boyer announced his departure in December, Anders Hedegaard said a successor was unlikely to be in place until early summer, and although it is unseasonably mild out, summer is a long way off.

“We went full speed ahead as soon as we knew Anders would be leaving. We immediately launched a recruitment process and soon after we had some very qualified candidates, one of them being Marcus. As we had the chance to close a deal relatively fast, there was no point in waiting,” he says and continues:

“The cautious estimate I gave in December reflects the fact that you never know about recruitment processes and how things pan out, so it’s out of your hands. It takes two to tango. But we are obviously happy that it happened so fast, because it gives us the chance to bring Marcus in and let him observe from the sidelines with Anders, so we’ll have a smooth transition.”

Does that mean that Anders will stay on until June?

“Anders has a contract running until early summer, but we will now facilitate a handover of tasks from Anders to Marcus, and we expect it to go off without a hitch, and then we’ll settle on the exact date. We are in an ideal situation right now. We are set to release our annual report soon, which Anders will submit, and then Marcus can take the time to get to know things and gradually take over,” he says.

The recruitment of Marcus Desimoni is not just a recruitment of a new CFO; it is also the “recruitment” of a whole family that will now relocate to Copenhagen.

“We, in the management group, of course want to ensure that Marcus and his family settle in well. There are some predetermined things that we will address. We can’t do much about the weather, and the high taxes we can try to do something about, but it’s not really in our hands. Everything else is something we can help with, and we will try to do so,” Anders Hedegaard says in conclusion.

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- translated by Martin Havtorn Petersen

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