It happened with the Royal DSM. Almost a year ago, the Dutch food technology company announced that it would merge with the Swiss firm Firmenich, and now the merger is complete. The new company DSM-Firmenich can be found in the AEX, the leading Amsterdam stock exchange index, on 1 June, it was announced on Tuesday. This will formally be a Swiss company, with a group top that is also based in Switzerland.
It was widely expected that the merger would come to fruition. Especially new are the details that recently came out about the further organization of the company. Dimitri de Vreeze will lead the new group. For the past three years he has already managed DSM with a co-Chairman, the Swiss-British-French Geraldine Matchett. Together they would also lead the merged company, but it has now been decided otherwise, DSM reported last week. According to the company, it is no longer necessary to have duo chairpersons. Opposite The Financial Times Matchett, who is leaving the company, said on Tuesday that with two chairmen it “might be too complicated” to bring the merger partners together in the future.
It is also clear that the top of DSM-Firmenich will also remain quite Dutch in other positions. The financial director will be Ralf Schmeitz, a Limburger who previously held a senior financial position at DSM.
DSM originally from Limburg
The merger of DSM with Firmenich has regularly been criticized in the Netherlands. Wasn’t another classic Dutch company lost here, after Shell and RELX? DSM has its origins in the Limburg state mines, but now only maintains a second head office in Maastricht. The company has always emphasized that it will retain a Dutch stock exchange listing. One of the four divisions will also be located in Delft, where DSM recently announced the arrival of a large research center financed by the insurer ASR.
Matchett and De Vreeze decided on the surprising merger in May 2022 because they said they saw a good match between Firmenich’s fragrances and flavors and DSM’s food technology. Firmenich is the second largest company in the world in its field of activity. It produces ingredients for a variety of products, from toilet fresheners to chicken flavourings. It was owned by the eponymous family for more than a century. She owns 34 percent of the shares in the new company. DSM-Firmenich employs 28,000 people and has a turnover of more than 10 billion euros.
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The expectation of the merger partners is that they can make a lot of profit, especially in the field of food – the branch in Delft – by merging. When announcing the merger, the companies themselves estimated that they could generate more than 500 million euros in additional revenue.
The chairmanship of two people at DSM was a rarity in the Dutch business community. Such a construction is rare. Only at chip machine manufacturer ASML is the day-to-day management also entrusted to two people. Matchett and De Vreeze have often stated over the past three years that their joint leadership only worked because they understood each other exceptionally well. “Intuitively we know what business as usual is and what we need to discuss with each other,” Matchett said in a 2022 conversation with NRC.