IR Impact pays tribute to one of our most lauded IR professionals and a true pioneer of investor relations
Magdalena Moll, or Maggie as many called her, recently passed away. She remains at the top of the IR Impact Awards league tables, having dominated the most prestigious positions in the Europe Awards year after year as the lead for German chemicals giant BASF.
Some years there were humorous groans as she stepped up to claim yet another trophy. Once, when this writer asked for her views (yet again), she said quite seriously that she had nothing left to say, having been tapped for her thoughts on IR best practice too many times. Laurie Havelock, IR Impact editor, recalls Moll as ‘one of my first interviewees as a baby IR Magazine reporter – and a delightful human being. My overriding image is of her with armfuls of trophies at our awards each year’.
For all of us at IR Impact – and in particular those of us in the editorial team – Moll is part of the IR story; a woman who set a high bar for what IR should be all about. As head of IR at BASF and as a founding board member and former president of the German IR association DIRK, she pushed forward the profession she mastered – with lasting impact.
‘Magdalena Moll was an extraordinary personality who significantly shaped the development of investor relations at BASF as well as in Germany,’ Dr. Stefanie Wettberg, senior vice president investor relations, BASF, tells IR Impact. ‘She was well-known and respected. At times, she could be demanding, but as a result, she made a difference and moved things forward. She will be missed.’
Shaping German IR…
The condolences have poured in since DIRK’s Kay Bommer shared the news on LinkedIn. ‘Magdalena Moll, the former president of DIRK, died much too early,’ he wrote. ‘She was a founding board member of DIRK in December 1994, vice president from 2010 to 2012 and president of DIRK from 2012 to 2014. With her expertise and competence, she has made an enormous contribution to shaping the investor relations function in its current form. I personally worked closely and trustingly with her for many years. I will miss you!
‘My deepest sympathy goes to her husband, Rainer. RIP, Maggie!’
Also writing on LinkedIn, Martin Ziegenbalg, head of IR at DHL Group, described Moll as ‘a true heavyweight in the history of German investor relations. A great peer and I cherish our joint work as board members of DIRK. She will be missed as a unique person. Rest in peace, Maggie.’
…with an international focus
Eddie Arcari, an IR and business development specialist at CTFN, talks to IR Impact about working with Moll back in the 1990s. when she was at German telecoms firm Mannesmann. ‘She actually was my first German IR client, at a time when the company was doing a lot of acquisitions,’ recalls Arcari.
‘Looking back on it now, Maggie really was quite groundbreaking for German companies. She looked much more at foreign shareholders – she had more of a global approach and was very keen to learn about what non-German peers were doing in the sector to uncover what could be learned from them.’
That, says Arcari, was at a time when German companies were less likely to do a global roadshow because they had the benefit of cross shareholding: their biggest shareholders were big German banks. ‘Moll wanted to do roadshows that were more akin to peers in the US, where this type of corporate access was far more common.’
So, what was Moll like to work with at the time? Arcari describes her as ‘demanding and very interesting to work with because we were doing a lot of things that hadn’t really been done before with German companies. It definitely felt groundbreaking at the time.’
Thirty stars for 30 years
Moll spent seven years at Mannesmann before a four-year stint at Henkel, though it was at BASF where she really made her mark in the IR Impact Awards hall of fame. She left BASF after nearly 13 years at the company – but not before sharing the secrets to the success of the BASF IR team – a combination of a strong group strategy, a very ambitious IR program and support from management and various departments within the firm, all of which ‘helps us communicate such a huge company’.
In 2016, Moll joined OMV and it was there that she eventually moved out of investor relations, taking up a role as the company’s head of corporate affairs. This author caught up with Moll two years later, when IR Impact interviewed her as one of our 30 IR stars – marking 30 years of what was then IR Magazine.
She shared the things she missed most about investor relations: ‘The financially and strategically driven discussions with analysts and investors, the long-standing, trustful personal relationships with the financial market participants that I developed over the past 25 years, and winning many prizes at the IR Magazine Awards – a wonderful recognition of the work of my teams and me.’
