How do you introduce a new CEO to thousands of employees? After the merger of earlier this year, DSM-Firmenich decided to record a video at Dimitri de Vreeze’s home in Eindhoven.
We see his morning routine: three pieces of fruit with a cup of tea. A signed photograph of the lunar lander Charles Duke in the windowsill. A washed cycling suit on the heating.
We also see De Vreeze fall over with a cry from a complex yoga position. A voiceover mocks his table tennis confidence.
This video, which is not public, corresponds to who he is, says Inge Brakman, supervisory director at DSM Nederland (and at a number of other companies). “Dimitri has a high degree of self-relativization.” Self-mockery is no stranger to him, and according to Brakman it also fits with a new generation of top executives who are slowly making their way into the business world.
As of September 1, De Vreeze (1967) is chairman of the board of the Swiss food and health chemistry company DSM-Firmenich (30,000 employees, turnover of more than 10 billion euros). He has been at the top of DSM since 2020 with co-director Geraldine Matchett. He leaves the merger combination, De Vreeze continues solo.
DSM-Firmenich, which has a stock exchange listing in Amsterdam and a head office in Maastricht and near Basel, has not been doing very well in recent months. The vitamin market, important to the company, is in a dip worldwide. De Vreeze must stabilize the company and complete the integration of the two parts.
NRC spoke to five people who know De Vreeze well. Who is he?
Real DSM man
The first thing you hear about De Vreeze: he is a real DSM man. De Vreeze is from Groningen, but moved to the south of the country in his twenties and started working for Dutch State Mines (DSM). He knows all the corners of this part of the merged company.
Second, he is strategic and likes to “pace up,” says Brakman. “He is bold and takes quantum leaps”, says friend and Unilever CEO Hein Schumacher. “DSM hesitated for a while,” says Brakman. “Materials and food. Dimitri and Geraldine have kept going, with gigantic steps in a short time.” The materials division was sold, the company merged, DSM-Firmenich officially became Swiss.
De Vreeze’s love for speed was also apparent in an interview in NRC in 2022. Four months after he and Matchett took office, in 2020, De Vreeze was eager to acquire Glycom, a manufacturer of infant nutrients. Preferably quickly. “Dimitri said yes, we can sell this and this to take over Glycom!” Matchett summed up.
She thought he was going too fast. According to the two directors, it was the first test of their cooperation (after a ‘time-out’, the takeover finally went ahead).
The generation before him was of the ‘strong leaders’, slightly stricter and closed figures
Inge Brackman supervisory director at DSM Netherlands
It is often good that De Vreeze is so thorough, but the downside is that he sometimes thinks that people come up with too many details. Then his interest in a meeting may weaken somewhat. But since De Vreeze can handle criticism well according to people who know him, he also allows himself to be pointed out.
Commissioner Brakman, who has been with many companies for a long time, sees De Vreeze as part of a new generation of top executives. “The fifties. They are energetic and fit, communicative, strongly strategic and show more of themselves.” According to her, the generation above was more of the ‘strong leaders’, somewhat stricter and more closed figures. Brakman says that De Vreeze found selling the materials branch, in which he himself rose, really difficult, just like Firmenich’s demand that the merged company become Swiss. “So he shares that.”
Young Captain award winner
The ‘fifties’ also have good contact with each other. Hein Schumacher of Unilever got to know De Vreeze years ago because they both won the Young Captain prize, for management talent under the age of forty. He notes that the group of directors to which Dimitri and he belong often have to fill ‘big shoes’: for example, Feike Sijbesma’s at DSM, Paul Polman’s at Unilever. “They started something.” They gave sustainability a prominent place in the policy. “But how are we going to fill that in? How do you actually make a business just zero? How do you choose your own path? We talk about that a lot.”
They sometimes go for a walk or cycle, but more often just eat with a group. Roy Jakobs of Philips, also winner of the Young Captain award, also belongs to their network, which keeps in touch together in an app group.
During those dinners, De Vreeze turns out to be little culinary for a leader of a food chemical company, Schumacher jokes. “I will still throw a burger on the barbecue when we meet. Dimitri usually has something delivered.”
Sense of discipline
De Vreeze grew up as a child of a mother from the Dutch East Indies and a father from Groningen. He was the only one in a family of seven children who had been given the opportunity to study, but he did so while working five days a week.
He raised De Vreeze with a great sense of discipline and responsibility. Be aware of the luxury of being able to study in the afternoon instead of in the evening, it sounded.
Read also‘We intuitively know what to discuss’
Sports and study
De Vreeze studied business economics in Groningen and became a member of the Albertus Magnus association. There was partying there, but according to best friend Thijs Kolster, De Vreeze was also seriously involved in sports and studies. He was already practicing karate in high school, and during his studies he took a group of friends in tow as a karate fitness training teacher. “It was heavy enough to break down in the Groningen parks,” says Kolster. “The idea was a bit: we do this next to all the partying.”
After his studies, De Vreeze immediately started working at DSM, on the other side of the country. His father, with whom De Vreeze would always go through his career steps, urged him to invest in himself even more financially. De Vreeze eventually did an additional postgraduate course in Maastricht to become a registered controller.
Within DSM, De Vreeze, who has four children, worked his way up for a quarter of a century. He made a name for himself after 2006, when he helped the crisis-hit resins business survive. That earned him the Young Captain award.
The prize may not be well known to the outside world, but it created awareness within DSM. More importantly, De Vreeze would later say that after the win he saw his father proud for the first time.
De Vreeze and Matchett often pointed out during their duo presidency that they made better choices because they were together. After three years together, De Vreeze, who receives a salary of just over 5 million euros, can now show it on his own.
The first test will be the ailing vitamin branch. Before the summer he came here with a number of measures to stabilize things. The preliminary consensus among analysts: action is being taken quickly.
Correction (September 2, 2023): An earlier version of this piece stated that De Vreeze has four children from two marriages. De Vreeze has four children from one marriage. This has been corrected above.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper on September 2, 2023.