Puma SE has a new chairman of its supervisory board. The German sportswear company said on the twenty first of October that a court had appointed Dennis Tao to the supervisory board with immediate effect, and that the board had elected him chairman at an extraordinary meeting held the same day.
Tao is head of mergers and acquisitions and capital markets at ANTA Sports Products Limited, which became Puma's largest shareholder earlier this month after acquiring the stake previously held by Artemis, the investment company of the Pinault family. He sat on the board of Amer Sports between 2019 and this year.
The same announcement named Jeanne Huang, chief executive of PIPA International Limited, as a second court appointed member of the supervisory board. Roland Krueger becomes deputy chairman and chair of the audit committee, taking both roles from Jean-Marc Duplaix. Heloise Temple-Boyer, the outgoing chair, concluded her tenure on completion of the share sale.
Two things about the mechanism are worth stating plainly, because they are easy to misread. Neither Tao nor Huang was elected by shareholders. Both were appointed by a court, which is the ordinary German procedure for filling supervisory board vacancies between general meetings, and both appointments run only until Puma's annual general meeting next year, at which shareholders will vote on them.
The substance is a change of ownership working its way through the governance. Artemis held its position in Puma for years and the chair came with it. ANTA, a Chinese sportswear group that already owns Amer Sports and a portfolio of international brands, has taken that position and has put its own corporate development executive in the chair rather than an independent figure.
For Puma the question that follows is strategic rather than procedural. The company has been losing ground to larger competitors in its core running and training categories, and a new controlling shareholder with a record of buying and integrating sports brands will have views about where the business is pointed. A supervisory board chaired by that shareholder's head of mergers and acquisitions is the structure through which those views reach the management board.
Puma separately announced the appointment of Arne Arens as chief commercial officer, which gives the company a reshaped commercial leadership alongside the reshaped board.
The court appointment route is worth understanding because it is often misreported outside Germany as a sign of dysfunction. It is not. Under German stock corporation law a supervisory board must remain quorate, and where a vacancy arises between general meetings the local court appoints a replacement on application. The procedure is routine, it is used whenever a shareholder sells out mid year, and the appointments it produces are temporary by design so that shareholders retain the final say at the next general meeting.
