Australia: Ryan Stokes has been appointed as the chairman of Boral. The appointment follows Seven Group’s acquisition of a majority shareholding in Boral in late July 2021. Kathryn Fagg, the former chair, has retired from Boral. Richard Richards, a Seven Group nomination, has also been appointed as a director. Stokes is the managing director and chief executive officer of Seven Group, an Australian-based conglomerate that operates in the industrial services, oil and gas and media sectors.

US: Fortera has appointed Eric Olsen to its board of directors. Olsen is the former chief executive officer (CEO) of LafargeHolcim.

He started his career in the field of mergers and acquisitions at Deloitte & Touche, Banque Paribas and was one of the managing partners of Trinity Associates for six years. He studied business at the University of Colorado and holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from HEC international business school in Paris. He joined Lafarge Group in 1999 and was a member of its executive committee from 2007 until its merger with Holcim in 2015 to form LafargeHolcim. He then worked as the CEO of LafargeHolcim until April 2017 when he resigned following a review into a conduct of a cement plant in Syria. Legal charges of financing a terrorist organisation were dropped by French authorities in 2019.

Fortera is a materials technology company that has developed a recarbonation process that uses captured CO2 and mineralises it into a secondary cementitious material. In March 2021 it signed a collaboration agreement with Lehigh Hanson to build a carbon capture and storage (CCS) system at the producer’s 0.8Mt/yr integrated Redding Cement plant in California.

Russia: Sibirsky Cement has appointed Dmitry Kireev as the managing director of the Krasnoyarsk cement plant and Vladimir Afanasin as the managing director of the Angarskcement plant.

Kireev worked at Sibirsky Cement’s Topkinsky cement plant from 2001 until 2013, eventually becoming the director for equipment maintenance and repair. He was then appointed as the managing director of TimlyuiCement before becoming the head of the Angarskcement plant in 2016. He is a graduate of the Belgorod Technological Institute of Building Materials and the Kuzbass State Technical University. He also holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree from the Moscow International Higher School of Business (MIRBIS).

Afanasin became the deputy chief engineer at the Topkinsky cement plant in 2007. He later worked at Krasnoyarsk cement plant until 2011 as the chief engineer, technical director and the production director. In 2011, he became the head of Angarskcement and then managed the Krasnoyarsk cement plant from 2016. Afanasin is a graduate of the Belgorod Technological Institute of Building Materials and holds an MBA from MIRBIS.

Germany: Bosch Rexroth has appointed Holger von Hebel as its chief financial officer (CFO) and the Director of Industrial Relations with effect from 1 October 2021. He will retain his position as head of the Mobile Hydraulics business unit. Von Hebel succeeds Markus Forschner, who will join the board of management of Robert Bosch as CFO and chief performance officer in 2022.

Von Hebel studied industrial engineering in Berlin and Karlsruhe. He joined the Bosch Group in 1990 as a trainee. After serving in a range of management positions in Germany and other countries, he became the commercial director of Switzerland-based Bosch subsidiary SIG Pack International in 2004. In 2005, von Hebel was given additional responsibility for finances, controlling and IT at the former Packaging Technology division of Bosch. Afterward, he became chairman of the divisional board of management of Bosch Solar Energy. Von Hebel has worked in a variety of areas at Bosch Rexroth since 2013 when he became the commercial director of the former Industrial Applications business unit. He has been the managing director of the Mobile Hydraulics division since 2017.

Bosch Rexroth supplies drive and control technologies to a variety of industries including the cement sector.