Evonik Implements Leadership Change

• Chief Executive Officer Klaus Engel hands over to Christian Kullmann
• Shareholders at annual meeting approve dividend payment of €1.15 per share
• Investors endorse actions of executive board

Klaus Engel, long-standing chief executive officer of Evonik, handed over to Christian Kullmann at the end of the annual shareholders’ meeting. In Essen’s Grugahalle Engel bid farewell to the shareholders. Werner Müller, chairman of the supervisory board, thanked Engel for his great service.

"You successfully led the company through the global financial and economic crisis and steered the development of Evonik from a conglomerate to one of the leading specialty chemical companies,” said Müller. “Today Evonik is excellently positioned – and the recent acquisition of Air Products specialty additives business, which you successfully managed in May 2016, contributed to that.”

Engel joined Evonik’s executive board in 2007 and has been its chairman since 2009. “Evonik has all the prerequisites to actively and successfully shape the future and to take advantage of attractive and sustainable growth prospects,” Engel said. “Therefore, I can leave Evonik in the hands of my successor with confidence.”

With a stable dividend of €1.15 per share, Evonik again generated a return for investors of more than four percent, measured by the closing stock price on December 31. Shareholders at the annual meeting approved the dividend proposal with almost 100 percent and endorsed the actions of the executive and supervisory boards with similar majorities.

Shareholders voted in favour of Aldo Belloni, chief executive officer of Linde AG, joining the supervisory board. Belloni will replace Haniel CEO Stephan Gemkow, who resigned his mandate at the annual shareholders’ meeting.