“Production is not coming back to Europe”

Mr. Appel, no other Dax CEO has been in office as long as you. How has the work at the top of the group changed in these 15 years?

It is always claimed that the challenges have increased. I’m not so sure. Peter Ustinov once said: In twenty years we’ll be talking about the good old days. But the current or the coming year is always the most difficult. Many say the world has become more complex, and as a result, corporate governance has become more demanding. I disagree. Take 2020, the Covid year. It was said that things will never be the same again. That was exaggerated. If we ignore the terrible war in Ukraine and inflation, little has changed. People travel, they go to the cinema and to restaurants, they shop, they live the same way as before. As a company, we have to deal with the changes. But to praise oneself today, because everything has become so difficult, would be a bit too easy for me.

Are there things you would have liked to finish?

My wife gave me the right advice two years ago when we were debating the best time to quit: Frank, it will never be finished. And that’s true.

After the top results in 2022, your successor Tobias Meyer will initially have a harder time than you did last time.

This thought prompted me in December 2021 to extend it again until May of this year instead of stopping in 2022. Precisely because I thought it was unfair to hand over the company after a year of record numbers. At the time, like most people, I assumed that we would see normalization in 2022. But then we had even better figures last year because of the good results in logistics. Nobody saw this coming before. And now my successor is actually in the situation I wanted to avoid.

At the age of 61 you could certainly have extended your contract. Many were surprised you didn’t.

Exactly that was an important argument for the point in time: that the organization didn’t expect me to leave. And that’s good because there was no long discussion and speculation about my successor. You can see in other companies how much energy it costs and what it can do. So we only had a very short phase in which one or the other was a bit irritated, and then work went on as normal.

Swiss Post is a global corporation with more than 600,000 employees in two hundred countries around the world. Is there a size from which such a structure can no longer be controlled?

Our group with its five divisions is now one unit, unlike fifteen years ago. The fact that our organization manages to deal with the diversity of people from so many countries and cultures has a lot to do with our motto: respect and results. It sounds simple, some have smiled at it, but that’s what matters. Showing respect, listening to people, but also treating them in a way that their culture requires. Social customs are different in every country. But underneath, people have the same needs and expectations. If you realize that, it is actually not that difficult to lead such an organization and keep it together.