Kai Buentemeyer, the erstwhile CEO and managing partner of Kolbus and chairman of the board of the Printing and Paper Technology Association within the VDMA, is set to join the board of Impel Services, the holding company of the Impel-Bindwel-Stelda group as a non-executive director.
Buentemeyer will bring his substantial experience in the evolution of bookbinding and packaging technologies across the globe, where he played an active part during the last few decades, to the India-based Impel group. The Impel group, with investments and production of equipment in both bookbinding and end-of-line packaging, stands to benefit greatly from his counsel.
The Impel-Bindwel group, built on the foundation of service and quality products, has collaborative and long-standing partnerships with Henkel, Nordson, GUK (G&K VIJUK), SIPM, and other domain expert organizations. In the last two decades, the group has co-creating a strong perfect binding industry in India and for book printing exports. It has ventured further to end-of-line packaging with its Stelda brand and is ready to grow into newer international markets as well as adjacent businesses. The addition of Kai Buentemeyer to its board is an impactful move in this direction.
Buentemeyer joined the Rahden-based engineering major Kolbus as a young engineer and worked his way up, becoming its sole managing director in 2003. He is credited with leading the revival of the group by introducing newer bookbinding equipment for the larger book printers and trade binders – two of its core customer segments. When market forces diminished the opportunity for two European suppliers of large binding systems, Büntemeyer took the lead in the consolidation and merger of the Kolbus bookbinding equipment with Muller Martini.
His vision had led the Kolbus group into the fast-growing industry of luxury packaging niche even before the merger of the bookbinding business with Muller Martini. The pivot to packaging technology was accelerated by the acquisitions of HyCorr in the USA and Autobox in the UK.
In his role as the chairman of the board of the Printing and Paper Technology Association of the German Engineering Association VDMA, he helped set up Global Print, which is an International Federation of print and paper technology associations created to further the common interests and mutual understanding of manufacturers of printing, paper-making and converting machinery, equipment and consumables. Büntemeyer served as president of Global Print from 2012 to 2014. He is known as a passionate advocate of the benefits of paper, print, and packaging.
Since leaving Kolbus in 2019, he worked as the interim CEO of EOL packaging experts, who manufacture high-performance end-of-line packaging machines. He has served on the board of the flexible packaging technology giant Windmoeller & Hoelscher and is an angel investor in ETIQ AI, a UK-based artificial intelligence start-up.
