Håkan Rudels Named New Business Area Head for Bonnier Books

Håkan Rudels Named New Business Area Head for Bonnier Books

Bonnierförlagen’s CEO Håkan Rudels has been appointed new head for Bonnier’s business area Books. The business area comprises Bonnier’s entire book business and is the leading book publishing group in Northern Europe.

Håkan Rudels started at Bonnierförlagen in 2005, where he served as head of marketing for Albert Bonniers Förlag and then for the entire Bonnierförlagen publishing house before becoming CEO in 2014. As he now takes on the role as head of Bonnier Books, he will remain CEO of Bonnierförlagen, where CFO Sara Börsvik will take on the additional role of chief operating officer.

In addition to the Swedish book operations, the Bonnier Books business area includes publishing houses in Germany, the U.K., Finland, Norway and Poland as well as digital and physical book sales. The business area has 2,500 employees and sales of SEK 7.7 billion in 2016.

Tomas Franzén, CEO Bonnier AB, says: “Håkan Rudels has proven himself in a number of roles at Bonnierförlagen, which has shown strong development both financially as well as in publishing during his years as CEO. With his significant industry expertise, I am convinced that Håkan is the right person to lead this business area. We have high ambitions for continued development and growth in our book publishing operations.”

Says Rudels: “In my opinion, this is the most interesting job in the publishing world. Becoming responsible for Bonnier’s collective book publishing business, with its 200 years of tradition of constant renewal and innovation, feels magical. The most important thing for us is to remain relevant to our writers, readers, co-workers and owners in times of a dizzying array of media available and changed consumption patterns. As one of Europe’s leading publishing houses, our focus is to publish the best stories and to build modern, values-driven organizations. And of course, to ultimately have significantly higher revenues than costs, it’s neither easier nor more difficult than that.”

Rudels succeeds Jacob Dalborg, whose departure was announced in October.