Hartmut Eberlein was appointed to the Executive Board of GEA Group Aktiengesellschaft on December 1, 2005. As of January 1, 2006 he is responsibile for Finance.
Hartmut Eberlein was born in Wesel, Germany, on August 14, 1952. He studied economics at the University of Freiburg, graduating in 1976. He started his professional career at what was then Treuhand-Vereinigung - now PricewaterhouseCoopers Deutschland - in Essen, where he worked in several functions, finally as head of Audit. In 1986 he joined Klöckner-Humboldt-Deutz AG, Cologne, as head of the Accounting department. In the same year he qualified as a tax accountant.
In 1989 Hartmut Eberlein moved to Continental AG, Hannover, to take charge of the Accounting function within the Finance department. Between 1992 and 2003 he was also responsible for mergers and acquisitions (M&A), overseeing some of the company's key takeovers, the last one being the acquisition of Temic GmbH. In addition he was appointed head of Finance in 1999. In this capacity he worked on the financing of the company's acquisitions, on its first credit ratings and on its adoption of American accounting standards (U.S. GAAP). Hartmut Eberlein played a key role in enabling Continental to return to the DAX stock index and to enter the automotive systems business by acquiring Teves. He transformed the company's ownership structure by making it much more international as part of a wide-ranging global investor relations campaign.
