Pieter Elbers will leave next year as CEO of KLM airline. The company has that announced on Thursday. His current second term will expire on May 1, 2023 and the KLM Supervisory Board says it has “determined” after close consultation with Elbers that he will not remain for a third term. It is not yet known who will be his successor.
Why Elbers will not remain as CEO has not been disclosed. He worked for KLM for thirty years. He was on the board for eleven years, of which he was CEO for eight years. Cees ‘t Hart, chairman of the Supervisory Board of KLM, states that Elbers has “an enormous track record and significance” within the company.
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The past few years have been tough for KLM. The corona crisis hit society hard: worldwide air traffic came to a standstill around March 2020 and many planes were grounded at the start of the pandemic. In that year parent company Air France-KLM posted a record loss of 7.1 billion euros – almost 20 million euros per day. Turnover (11.1 billion euros) was 59 percent lower than a year earlier.
At the start of the crisis, Elbers itself was discredited, because the company initially planned to increase his bonus – on top of his regular salary of around 520,000 euros – while air traffic was flat. The pandemic ultimately cost the airline some 6,000 jobs, it turned out last year, although the number of redundancies remained limited. KLM eventually waived the bonus for Elbers.
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