Davos forum founder Klaus Schwab to step down

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Klaus Schwab, the 86-year-old founder of the World Economic Forum, is to resign as its executive chair after more than half century at the helm of the world’s pre-eminent business conference.

Schwab has presided over the annual gathering in the Swiss ski resort of Davos since founding it in 1971, turning it into a hugely profitable enterprise, owned by a charitable foundation, with annual revenues of €500mn. He will step back in January and assume a new role as chair of WEF’s board of trustees.

Børge Brende, president of the WEF executive board and a former foreign minister of Norway, is to take over.

“The organisation has been undergoing a planned governance evolution from a founder-managed organisation to one where a president and managing board assume full executive responsibility,” WEF said on Tuesday.

Schwab helped transform the WEF from modest beginnings as the European Management Symposium — a conference for European businessmen to swap strategy ideas backed by the European Commission — into a conference attended by top chief executives, bankers and policymakers.

At its latest gathering earlier this year, the forum attracted more than 50 heads of state including Argentina’s President Javier Milei, policymakers including European Central Bank’s head Christine Lagarde and dozens of business leaders including JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella.

Companies pay up to SFr600,000 ($658,000) in annual membership fees, with attendees often paying additional huge sums to secure accommodation.

A German-born mechanical engineer, Schwab founded the conference while working as a business professor at the University of Geneva. Davos, the remote village he picked as its home, was immortalised by German writer Thomas Mann in his novel The Magic Mountain, in which an unworldly sanatorium of oddballs satirises a European society hurtling towards war.

Targeted by climate activists, populists and anti-capitalists, the conference has recently struggled to maintain its allure as geopolitical tensions and protectionism dent its pro-globalisation mantra.

Schwab has also come under fire, both for his SFr1mn salary and treading a fine line between the forum’s work as a charity and the private ventures linked to its founder and his family operating close to it.

The WEF’s relationship with Davos is also under mounting strain: the village plans to hold a referendum for residents this June that could sharply limit the number of people who attend the conference, by restricting the rental of premises to official guests only.

Schwab has threatened to move the conference elsewhere — pointing to the success of its gathering in Singapore during the coronavirus pandemic.

Semafor first reported Schwab would step down.