中文There’s a moment in every struggling company’s life when the board realises the grass wasn’t actually greener. For HH Global, that moment came this month — and the fix was sitting in the room the whole time.
The creative production and procurement giant has quietly put Mike Perez back in the corner office. If that name sounds familiar, it should: Perez was already HH’s group CEO between 2021 and 2023. He stepped back into a non-executive director role, watched from the sidelines for a couple of years, and is now being handed the keys again. The man he replaces, Kristian Elgey, is out. Elgey came up through the finance ranks — he was the group CFO before taking the top job in November 2023 — and had been with the business for just over a decade.
So why the U-turn? Let’s be honest about the numbers, because they tell the real story. In the financial year that closed on 31 March 2026, HH Global’s sales slipped 4% to £1.68 billion. That might sound like a gentle wobble, but look closer and the picture gets uncomfortable. Operating profit fell by more than a quarter — down 26.8% to £54.9 million. Adjusted EBITDA dropped 11% to £137.14 million. And the bottom line? A loss of £32.4 million, up from a £9.6 million loss the year before. When your losses more than triple, “steady as she goes” stops being a viable strategy.
Perez isn’t a stranger coming in cold. He’s been at HH for 15 years, and before his first run as CEO he ran the Americas business and served as global managing director. He knows the clients, he knows the machinery of the company, and — crucially — he knows where the bodies are buried. That institutional memory is exactly what a business in retreat needs.
Alongside him, Nadia Pelekanos gets a big promotion to deputy group CEO. She’s been the chief client officer for retail, luxury and FMCG, and she’s been with HH in two stints — first from 2003 to 2011, and then continuously since October 2019. Her remit is expanding to cover client relationships, operations, technology and sales enablement. In plain English: she’s now one of the most powerful people in the building.
The official line is that the two of them will “accelerate growth, enhance client value and invest in the technology, data and AI capabilities that are shaping the future of marketing activation.” It’s polished corporate speak, but the substance underneath is real. HH serves the kind of clients most print businesses only dream about — Coca-Cola, HSBC, Adidas and Samsung among them. It operates 75 offices and reaches more than 120 countries. When a company that size stumbles, the ripple effects hit suppliers, agencies and print partners across the globe.
There’s another thread worth pulling. Over the summer, parent company HH Global Finance Holdings refinanced its debts with a new senior facilities agreement worth around $800 million — three term loan tranches that don’t mature until August 2031, plus a $100 million revolving credit facility. Refinancing isn’t glamorous, but it buys breathing room. Whoever sits in the CEO chair needs that runway to execute a turnaround.
And let’s not forget the backdrop. HH swallowed larger rival Inner Workings six years ago in a mega-merger that, at the time, gave it combined sales north of $1.5 billion. Integrating a business that size takes years, and the strain shows in the numbers.
Here’s what this means for the rest of us in print and packaging. HH Global is one of the biggest buyers of creative production services on the planet. When it changes leadership, print shops, marketing agencies and procurement specialists everywhere pay attention — because their pipelines may shift. A CEO who came up through the Americas and knows the operational side intimately is more likely to protect the relationships that keep work flowing than one focused purely on the balance sheet.
The “boomerang CEO” is a well-worn plot in business. Sometimes it works — a leader returns with fresh perspective and none of the onboarding lag. Sometimes it’s a sign of a shallow bench. For HH Global, the bet is clear: bring back the person who grew the business before, pair him with a battle-tested deputy, and steady the ship before the lenders lose patience.
The next twelve months will tell us whether Perez 2.0 is a revival story or a holding pattern. For the printers and agencies who depend on HH’s spend, it’s a story worth watching closely.
Source: Printweek
