Komsa boss Urbon leaves company after five years

Farewell at technology distributor Komsa: Following a realignment and the merger with British company Westcoast, Komsa CEO Pierre-Pascal Urbon is leaving the company. After five years, he is leaving on March 31 "on the best of terms", as the company announced in Hartmannsdorf near Chemnitz.

Komsa was founded in 1992 as a supplier and service provider in the field of communication technology and developed into one of the largest family-owned companies in eastern Germany with an annual turnover of around 1.3 billion euros (2022/2023). It is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Westcoast.

In recent years, Komsa has been successfully restructured, Urbon told the German Press Agency. The loss-making repair business is profitable again. Cloud offerings and the Device-as-a-Service business have also been established. With Device-as-a-Service, companies no longer buy smartphones, laptops and entire workstations, but rent them instead. This gives them more flexibility and allows them to save on IT capacity, explained the 54-year-old. The company's financing has also been set up for the long term and significant investments have been made in automation.

Significant increase in earnings

As a result, the number of employees has been reduced from around 1,100 to around 1,000 - without redundancies, Urbon assured. The company had recently achieved better results. Due to an adjustment of the financial year to the calendar year, the last publicly available consolidated financial statements only cover nine months. From April to December 2023, the Group generated turnover of 896 million euros. Earnings before taxes (EBT) increased significantly and amounted to as much as in the entire previous year. The return on assets in the short financial year 2023 was reported at 13.9 percent.

His job at Komsa is now demonstrably done, said Urbon. "Every great journey has to come to an end." In future, he wants to pass on his experience as an investor to young technology companies and get involved in charitable projects abroad. On April 1, the Supervisory Board appointed Toni Burger and Ronny Tischer as new members of the Management Board. Together with Steffen Ebner, Sven Mohaupt and Katrin Haubold, they will steer the fortunes of Komsa in future.