Terex Corporation has reorganised its senior management and appointed Fil Filipov, president of Terex Lifting since 1996, to the new post of executive vice president of Terex Corporation. Filipov’s new role is to lead on acquisitions, investments and restructurings.
“Fil has the perfect background for this position,” said Terex chairman and CEO Ron DeFeo. “Over the past eight years, Fil has been instrumental in both restructuring Terex and building the most diversified lifting business in the world. In 2000, the lifting business had revenues of nearly $1 billion with an operating margin of 10%. When Fil started managing this business, it was one-tenth its current size and losing money.” DeFeo added: “In this newly established position, Fil will help us acquire and later run a variety of strategic opportunities that we feel can significantly outperform our weighted average cost of capital. Fil will also lead our business developmental activities in Asia and Eastern Europe. Some of these opportunities may become joint ventures or simply marketing agreements.” Concurrent with Filipov’s move, Terex is also reorganising its activities into geographic divisions, rather than by product category.
Colin Robertson, managing director of Terex Construction and of Powerscreen, becomes president of Terex Europe, in charge of all lifting and earthmoving businesses, except the O&K mining unit in Germany. Robertson, based in Scotland, was once general manager of Terex’s crane business in Waverly, Iowa.
Ernie Verebelyi, president of Terex Earthmoving, becomes group president, Terex Mining and Americas, in charge of Terex Mining globally and all units in North and South America. He also remains in charge of Franna, Jacques and Terex Mining businesses in Australia and Asia as well as the light construction division and the parts business.
Terex generates 55% of its $2.1bn sales in North America.
Ending the organisational distinction between earthmoving and lifting is designed to reduce the number of contacts that major customers need to have across the Terex organisation, Filipov said. Not only should it strengthen sales and marketing capabilities, it will also reduce costs.
DeFeo explained: “As we have grown, we have benefited from the product focus represented by our lifting and earthmoving segments. However, in the process the customer has seen several different faces of Terex, which at times has been detrimental to our objective of satisfying them. While we have become increasingly more of a global company, we believe that ultimately our business is a local one. The relationships we develop must therefore be local between the equipment users, the distribution channels and the manufacturer. I am confident that under the leadership of Ernie and Colin, this new structure will help us serve our customers and shareholders faster and better in the months ahead.” Each operation within Terex, such as PPM in France and Terex American in the USA, will continue to operate as quasi-independent business units.
