The leadership change at Zumtobel Group this autumn is about more than replacing one chief executive with another. In Heiner Lang, the Austrian lighting group is bringing in a manager whose career has been shaped more by automation, connectivity and industrial technology than by conventional lighting.
The supervisory board has appointed the former Wago chief as the company's new CEO. Lang will join the management board on 1 September 2026 and succeed Alfred Felder as chairman on 1 October. Felder has led the company since 2018 and will gradually hand over his responsibilities until the end of the year before remaining connected to Zumtobel in an advisory capacity.
The transition comes at a sensitive point. Zumtobel closed financial year 2025/26 with revenue of €1.040 billion, down 5.2% year on year. Adjusted EBIT declined 9.7% to €42.4 million, while net profit collapsed from €15.5 million to €1.0 million. No dividend is proposed for the year.
The picture is not uniformly bleak. Revenue also fell in the Lighting Segment, but adjusted EBIT there increased 6.6% to €54.7 million and the segment margin improved from 5.9% to 6.6%. Lang is therefore not inheriting a turnaround case, but he is taking charge of a group that needs a more convincing combination of growth and earnings.
The engineering doctorate brings a suitably industrial CV to that task. Lang has more than 25 years of international management and industry experience. Since 2021 he has headed Wago, the connection and automation technology specialist employing around 9,000 people. Wago generated revenue of about €1.34 billion in 2025.
Before that, Lang served on the divisional management board of Bosch Rexroth with responsibility for factory automation. That background may prove at least as relevant to Zumtobel as his experience running a company. The lighting market is already shifting away from the individual luminaire towards connected systems, sensors, controls and building technology.
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The leadership change at Zumtobel Group this autumn is about more than replacing one chief executive with another. In Heiner Lang, the Austrian lighting group is bringing in a manager whose career has been shaped more by automation, connectivity and industrial technology than by conventional lighting.
The supervisory board has appointed the former Wago chief as the company's new CEO. Lang will join the management board on 1 September 2026 and succeed Alfred Felder as chairman on 1 October. Felder has led the company since 2018 and will gradually hand over his responsibilities until the end of the year before remaining connected to Zumtobel in an advisory capacity.
The transition comes at a sensitive point. Zumtobel closed financial year 2025/26 with revenue of €1.040 billion, down 5.2% year on year. Adjusted EBIT declined 9.7% to €42.4 million, while net profit collapsed from €15.5 million to €1.0 million. No dividend is proposed for the year.
The picture is not uniformly bleak. Revenue also fell in the Lighting Segment, but adjusted EBIT there increased 6.6% to €54.7 million and the segment margin improved from 5.9% to 6.6%. Lang is therefore not inheriting a turnaround case, but he is taking charge of a group that needs a more convincing combination of growth and earnings.
The engineering doctorate brings a suitably industrial CV to that task. Lang has more than 25 years of international management and industry experience. Since 2021 he has headed Wago, the connection and automation technology specialist employing around 9,000 people. Wago generated revenue of about €1.34 billion in 2025.
Before that, Lang served on the divisional management board of Bosch Rexroth with responsibility for factory automation. That background may prove at least as relevant to Zumtobel as his experience running a company. The lighting market is already shifting away from the individual luminaire towards connected systems, sensors, controls and building technology.