Helge H. Wehmeier, the top executive of locally based Bayer Corp., announced his retirement Thursday amid a management shake-up at the company's headquarters in Germany.
Wehmeier, 59, has run the company's North American operations in Pittsburgh for 12 years. He retires July 1 after 35 years with the company and will be replaced by Attila Molnar, now a member of board of management for Bayer AG, the parent company.
Wehmeier will serve as interim vice chairman for the Bayer Corp., and will assist Molnar in the transition. Molnar, 53, a chemist who has worked at Bayer since 1978, will move to Pittsburgh later this year.
In a brief interview, Wehmeier said his retirement is the result of a personal choice. "Retirement has a certain biological component," the 59-year old chief executive said.
But those who closely follow the company doubt Wehmeier's timing is pure coincidence.
"It doesn't look that way — a lot of people are being moved around at Bayer right now, and I have trouble believing this is unrelated to the restructuring that the company is undertaking," said Tom Shrager, a partner at Tweedy Browne, a New York investment firm that owns $200 million in Bayer shares.
Wehmeier, a classical music enthusiast and vice chairman of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra's board of directors, plans to continue living in Pittsburgh.
Under the parent company's restructuring plan, which was initiated last year, Bayer AG will be run as four separate businesses. That plan, company officials said, is unlikely to significantly alter company operations in Pittsburgh.
The German parent company is also reducing the size of its management board, from seven members to five.
In the past year, Bayer's share prices have been undermined by a poor conditions in the chemical business, Wehmeier said.
The company also faces legal action for at least 31 deaths linked to the use of Baycol, an anticholesterol drug Bayer pulled from the market in August. A $15-million lawsuit was filed Tuesday in Oregon by four people who claim Baycol caused them serious health problems.
Wehmeier said Bayer officials do not yet know what long-term effect such lawsuits will have on the company.
The outgoing chief executive said he supports the changes in Bayer's structure. "You can capture the synergies of each business better with self-standing companies."
But analysts such as Tweedy Browne's Shrager fault Bayer for not splitting up into separate companies. Because Bayer operates so many different types of companies, he said trading its stock as a single company distorts the share price.
"Most chemical stocks trade at eight or nine times a company's operating value, but shares of pharmaceutical companies trade at about 18 times a company's operating value," Shrager said.
Yet Shrager said Bayer, despite recent splits in many similar conglomerates, has refused to do the same, in great part because half of the company's management board is made up of employees.
"They continue to be strongly opposed to splitting up," he said.
Yesterday, Bayer AG also named Klaus Kuehn as the company's chief financial officer. He replaces Werner Wenning, who will become Bayer AG's chief executive officer in April. The company also appointed Richard Pott, now the general manager of Bayer's specialty products business group, to be head of strategy and human resources.
