Interview with Dr. Christoph Bauer, CEO of DuMont

BAUER We want to further accelerate our successful growth. The fact that we have been able to continuously increase revenue and earnings over the past four years is the result of our diversification strategy, which we defined ten years ago to be more independent of structural changes in the media and technology landscape. Today, the triad of content, data, and technology forms the basis for our robust, future-proof portfolio that can exist and grow in the digital economy. In almost a decade, we have transformed from a newspaper group into a resilient group of companies that grows continuously through acquisitions, sales, foundations, and developments. This sets the stage for expanding DuMont as a family-owned business into an AI company, attracting the best talents, and operating sustainably. 

BAUER Our philosophy is "Embrace Technology." After all, in its more than 400-year company history, DuMont has always developed along the interfaces to the leading technology of its time - starting with letterpress printing. Today, the key drivers are customer centricity in the digital economy and artificial intelligence. DuMont currently generates 85 percent of its operating income with digital business models and aims to become an AI company. Consequently, the investment focus in all three business areas is equally on the further development and expansion of innovative products, services, and automation. 

BAUER We aim to put our customers’ needs at the center, network applications intelligently, and offer relevant solutions. That's why increasingly cross-functional, agile teams work in our business areas. It's important to set the right conditions for these teams and foster an entrepreneurial spirit. This creates the prerequisites for innovation. But above all, we are a family business that thinks and acts in the long term. The close and trustful collaboration between shareholders, the supervisory board, and the management team is the basis for bold decisions at DuMont. This includes not being afraid of disruptive changes. If you want to be successful, you have to make clear, forward-looking and evidence-based decisions in the markets – and stand by them. We have achieved this together. Aligning our corporate governance into a group of companies gave us the necessary entrepreneurial freedom – and new, also international perspectives. 

BAUER We achieve this through group-wide, value-based communication. Our strength lies in the relatively large entrepreneurial freedom of the individual companies, which operate under the DuMont brand within binding strategic guidelines and values. These guidelines create the freedom for a shared mindset that allows the group maximum flexibility. This has led us to a common understanding of our focus topics: ESG sustainability strategy, talent development and promotion, and the path to becoming an AI company. Entrepreneurial responsibility is perceived autonomously in all our companies, so we respect individual cultures and ways of working. This way, we bundle individual strengths of the various business areas under a common mission: to remain future-proof. And we network companies and employees in the group specifically in Circles, development programs, to develop initiatives, advance topics, and bundle know-how. 

BAUER A current innovation, which exemplifies our strategy to develop business models and markets for our customers, is currently being implemented in the business field of marketing technology: Entirely. With Entirely, DuMont will successively build the first open MarTech ecosystem over the next few years. The goal of Entirely is to connect leading MarTech applications and, for the first time, offer companies the possibility to design customer journeys end-to-end from a single source without system breaks and data silos. The base of Entirely are the DuMont companies and founding members censhare, ELAINE, Facelift and MARMIND, which have been successively acquired and further developed for DuMont with this vision since 2017. Together they serve over 2,800 customers in 13 countries and employ more than 400 people. Entirely also stands for our ambition to create a European MarTech champion that can compete globally. 

BAUER One of our five corporate values is "relevance" – we aim to provide our target groups with relevant content, data, technologies, and services at all times. "Nice to have" is not our cup of tea. Entirely is also a good example of why this claim is future-proof: the creation of an open ecosystem implies that features and products are further developed together with customers. This close exchange with our target groups, to create and offer the best solutions for their respective needs, is key to sustainable success for me.