About six months after the company's sale to private investors, Elan has appointed a three-member board of directors with two high-profile sports industry executives. Michaela Stitz, previously vice president and general manager for Nike in Central and Eastern Europe, has become the board's non-executive chairwoman. Another non-executive board member is Pascal Aymar, who spent many years at Salomon. The third board member is Jeffrey Tirman, founder and chief executive of Rhodium Capital Management, who has been appointed as the Elan group's “chief executive director.”
With the change of ownership, the Slovenian company has thus moved from a two-tier board structure to one-board governance. Under the new structure, the board consists of a mix of executive and non-executive directors appointed by the shareholders. Elan was divested last year by government-related and institutional investors and acquired by an arm of VR Capital Group, an asset management firm, backed by Merrill Lynch International.
The company's management was previously led by Leon Korošec, who handled sales and marketing, while Andreja Košir dealt with finance. Korošec, who drove continued innovation and expansion for the company in spite of uncertainties in the last years, remains at Elan as head of the winter sports division, while Košir is said to be leaving the group. As reported earlier this year (SGI Europe, Vol. 27 n°5-6), Elan is preparing to step up investments in several parts of its business. The management change should allow Korošec to focus entirely on the growth of the winter sports division.
Elan reports that the new chief executive director, Tirman, has more than 28 years of experience in international investment and restructuring. From 1997 until early 2013 he was president of Talisman Capital, where he spent five years focusing on capital structure arbitrage and other relative value strategies, and then specialized in corporate restructuring on behalf of several large institutional customers. Rhodium Capital Management, a London-based money management firm that Tirman co-founded in 2013, specializes in investments in European credit. For several years until 2013, Tirman was also an adjunct professor of advanced corporate finance and guest lecturer on credit markets and credit risk at HEC, a business school in Lausanne.
Stitz joined Nike in 1996, and then climbed the ranks to become general manager for Austria, Germany, Slovenia and Switzerland in 2007. Two years later she became vice president of Central and Eastern Europe. She was replaced in this job in 2014 by Marc van Pappelendam.
Aymar's track record in the industry includes eight years as global brand director at Salomon, where he assumed the added function of managing director for Asia-Pacific and South America. After another assignment for the Adidas group, as Reebok's vice president of marketing for Asia-Pacific, he spent nearly three years as general manager supervising the development of the Coalision group's brands in Europe and Asia. Along with his work as a consultant, Aymar is currently director of the graduate sports industry management unit at the EMLyon business school.
