Henkel CEO: We played offensive and we ended 2009 “decently”

In his first visit to Henkel’s Romanian offices, Kasper Rorsted, the CEO of the German company with 13.5bn-euro turnover globally, talked about the aggressive strategy the Romanian subsidiary relied on last year to counter falling consumption and about market polarisation. “Weak brands will cease to exist,” he says. New product launches on the market was the offensive strategy Henkel Romania banked on in a year with plunging consumption. The company has for this year budgeted rising investments from 2009 and a 5-10% sales increase in RON. “Last year we played offensive and brought new products onto the market, which allowed us to offset consumption decline. The steps to boost cost structure efficiency and efforts to keep our people motivated were also important,” states Rorsted. Henkel CEO counts on a rebound of the company’s Romanian turnover, after a year during which turnover contracted by around 3% in RON from 2008. 2009 brought the first annual sales decline for Henkel Romania of the 17 years it had operated on the market. The company reported sales of 571m RON (135m euros) for 2009, with the adhesive unit as its biggest division. “I expect Romania to continue to be a key-market for Henkel in CEE in the next ten years. Romania is one of the markets where we haven’t yet seen the full growth potential and it is more than a market: we can see opportunities of a different nature here,” Rorsted also says.