Lilium names former Airbus executive as its new CEO, replacing company co-founder Daniel Wiegand

Lil­i­um has named for­mer Air­bus exec­u­tive Klaus Roewe as its new CEO, who will replace com­pa­ny co-founder and cur­rent CEO Daniel Wie­gand.

Roewe will take up his new role on August 1st, while Wie­gand will still be part of the com­pa­ny as Lilium’s Chief Engi­neer for Inno­va­tion and Future Pro­grams and Board Direc­tor.

Dur­ing his 30 years at Air­bus, Roewe has spear­head­ed all phas­es of the life cycle of a com­mer­cial air­craft across Engi­neer­ing, Man­u­fac­tur­ing, Pro­gram man­age­ment and Cus­tomer Sup­port. He led Air­bus’ most impor­tant busi­ness line, the A320 and A320neo pro­grams, to unprece­dent­ed suc­cess dur­ing his tenure: improv­ing air­craft per­for­mance, dou­bling EBIT, cut­ting unit costs, while increas­ing mar­ket share and FCF, mak­ing it the most suc­cess­ful large com­mer­cial air­craft pro­gram of all time.

Com­ment­ing on his appoint­ment, Roewe said: “I’m proud to be join­ing the most inno­v­a­tive and dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed eVTOL com­pa­ny in our indus­try. I look for­ward to work­ing with all the Lil­i­um teams to advance the devel­op­ment of our air­craft and to dri­ve Lilium’s suc­cess in rev­o­lu­tion­s­ing sus­tain­able air trans­port.”

Tom Enders, Chair­man at Lil­i­um, said: “The Board ran an exten­sive glob­al CEO search and are gen­uine­ly excit­ed with the appoint­ment of Klaus Roewe. We believe adding Klaus as CEO will give us unpar­al­leled exe­cu­tion­al lead­er­ship to com­ple­ment Lilium’s inno­v­a­tive DNA as we con­tin­ue the devel­op­ment of the Lil­i­um Jet and advance towards Type Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and scale pro­duc­tion – Klaus has a breadth of oper­a­tional expe­ri­ence that is very rare in our indus­try.”

Wie­gand and his co-founders — Sebas­t­ian Born, Patrick Nathen and Matthias Mein­er — launched Lil­i­um in 2015, design­ing and prov­ing out a nov­el eVTOL jet archi­tec­ture and attract­ing some of the best tal­ent in the indus­try to help them achieve their mis­sion.

Since then, Lil­i­um has gone from a start-up to a Nas­daq-list­ed com­pa­ny with more than 800 employ­ees and a dynam­ic, expe­ri­enced, lead­er­ship team pulled from the best of aero­space and high-tech.

Bar­ry Engle, for­mer Pres­i­dent of GM North Amer­i­ca and Lil­i­um Board Direc­tor, said: “As CEO, Daniel has inspired us with a bold vision of trans­form­ing sus­tain­able region­al mobil­i­ty with a break­through elec­tric jet tech­nol­o­gy. As a Board and as investors, we are delight­ed that Daniel will con­tin­ue to focus on this vision and to help dri­ve inno­va­tion around core tech­nolo­gies and future prod­ucts.”

Wie­gand added: “I am absolute­ly thrilled to have Klaus Roewe as our next CEO — I firm­ly believe that he is the right per­son to lead us through this next phase; and adding him gives Lil­i­um the ide­al mix of Sil­i­con Val­ley inno­va­tion with deep aero­space know-how.”

As is stan­dard prac­tice, the for­mal role of CEO will be effec­tive upon approval at Lilium’s 2022 Annu­al Gen­er­al Meet­ing of Share­hold­ers.