中文Take a long look at Europe’s chemical industry right now and you will not find a calm picture. Costs are climbing, demand is soft, and competition from outside the region is relentless. Into that storm stepped Stephan Sielaff, who took over as Chief Executive Officer of the Schill+Seilacher Group on October 1 — and he is refreshingly blunt about what it will take to survive it.
“It’s not about cutting costs alone,” he says, in so many words. “A good product alone is no longer enough. What matters is the value we create for our customers.”
That sentence should be pinned above the desk of every supplier in the print and packaging chain. Because the companies that make the inks, the coatings, the adhesives, the specialty chemicals — they are the invisible backbone of everything that gets printed. When they thrive, the whole ecosystem breathes easier. When they stall, everyone feels it.
Thirty years of scars and lessons
Sielaff is not a stranger to hard markets. A chemical engineer by training, he brings nearly three decades across specialty chemicals and related industries. He cut his teeth at Unilever, ran innovation and engineering for Home and Personal Care Europe, then moved through Symrise, Archroma, Lenzing AG, and most recently SSI SCHÄFER Plastics.
That is a resume built in exactly the kind of demanding international environments Schill+Seilacher now operates in. The group is internationally active, and Sielaff’s pitch is to use that footprint better: “thinking globally, acting together and staying closer to our customers.”
Closeness is the word that keeps coming back. Not the geographic kind, though that matters too. The kind where you actually understand what your customer is trying to do, and you bring innovation to market fast enough to matter.
Why this should interest printers
Here is why a CEO change at a specialty chemicals group should be on your radar if you work in print or packaging. Schill+Seilacher’s world — surfactants, process chemicals, finishes — touches the formulations that make ink stick, that make paper coat cleanly, that make a package perform. The health of these suppliers is the health of your supply chain.
When a leader like Sielaff talks about “operational excellence” and “bringing innovation successfully to market,” he is describing the machinery that eventually shows up as a better ink, a faster cure, a coating that survives the recycling wash. The print industry does not innovate in isolation. It rides on the shoulders of its chemical suppliers.
The uncomfortable truth about Europe
Sielaff does not pretend the road is easy. International competitive pressure, rising costs, weak industrial demand — he names them plainly. And his answer is not the comfortable one. It is not “we’ll hunker down and wait it out.” It is “we move faster, work more closely with customers, and use our international strengths better.”
That takes courage, because speed and closeness cost money and attention in the short term. But the alternative — a slow drift into irrelevance while cheaper, nimbler competitors eat your lunch — costs everything.
Dr Peter Dürolf, Chairman of the Board, framed it well: “The world will not wait for us. Speed, international reach and the ability to turn good ideas into real business are becoming increasingly important.”
The lesson for the rest of us
There is a transferable truth here for any business in the print and packaging value chain. The era of winning on product alone is over. Your ink might be perfect. Your press might be flawless. But if you are slow, distant, and hard to work with, someone nimbler will take the relationship.
Sielaff’s arrival is a signal: even the quiet, foundational suppliers are being pushed to reinvent how they relate to the market. For printers and converters, that is good news — it means the people who make your materials are being forced to get closer to your problems. Lean into it. Tell them what you actually need. The suppliers who listen will be the ones left standing.
Source: WhatTheyThink / Schill+Seilacher press release (October 19, 2026).
