Neil Johnson takes up his new role on 1 June. He replaces Julian Rothwell, who left the business at the end of March for a new position outside the industry.
Walstead said that it had conducted a Europe-wide search to find a person with the right range of skills for the pan-European group, which is the region’s largest web offset printer.
Johnson has a first class honours in B.Eng Electrical & Electronic Engineering and more than three decades of experience. He began his career at Deloitte & Touche in the early 1990s and then took on a range of increasingly senior finance roles at firms including Courtaulds and British Energy Group. He most recently spent more than nine years as CFO at Sparrows Group, a global provider of specialist services to offshore energy and industrial markets.
Walstead Group CEO Paul Utting said he was excited to welcome Johnson to the leadership team: “Neil is a seasoned professional with an accomplished and distinguished finance career and has demonstrated successes in key financial and operational disciplines required of a world-class CFO.
“His profound experiences at the international CFO level will be integral and will support many of the initiatives, challenges, and the anticipated growth that we want to deliver in the next five years.”
Walstead chairman Mark Scanlon thanked Rothwell for six years of “impeccable service” and said he was sad to see him go.
“He has been a key member of the team that has successfully navigated the group through the commercial ravages of Covid, energy, and raw material cost proliferation,” he noted.
“We expect Neil to support Walstead’s next phase of growth as we expand our service offering and head towards €1bn revenue. I look forward to working with Neil.”
Walstead had sales of €546.4m (£482m) in its most recent accounts, for pandemic-impacted calendar year 2021, but put current revenues at the €640m mark.
Johnson will join the business during a key period that includes a multimillion pound investment at its Bicester site to expand and ramp up production to take on the News UK supplements currently produced at Prinovis in Liverpool, which will shut at the end of June.
Walstead employs 2,230 staff at its 13 production facilities in the UK, Spain, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Poland.
It runs 57 web offset and four gravure printing presses, processing 650,000tpa of paper.
Last month Stefan Gutheil, CEO of Walstead Leykam Druck, and Walstead Central Europe CEO Grzegorz Czech were appointed as directors of Walstead Group Ltd.
