Mathias Döpfner

Mathias Döpfner (born January 15, 1963), is Chief Executive Officer of German media group Axel Springer SE and President of the Federation of German Newspaper Publishers (BDZV).

Mathias Döpfner grew up in Offenbach am Main. His mother was a housewife and his father Dieter C. Döpfner was a university professor of Architecture and Director of the Offenbach College of Applied Arts from 1966 to 1970.

Mathias Döpfner and his wife Ulrike, née Weiß – the daughter of Ulrich Weiß, a former management board member of Deutsche Bank AG – live at Heiligen See in Potsdam and have three sons.

Mathias Döpfner studied musicology, German literature and theater science in Frankfurt and Boston. He began his career in 1982 as the music critic of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung supplement. After working as the FAZ correspondent in Brussels and as manager of a subsidiary of the Winderstein concert agency, Döpfner moved to Gruner + Jahr in 1992 – initially employed by board member Axel Ganz in Paris, later as assistant to the CEO Gerd Schulte-Hillen.

In April 1994, Döpfner became editor-in-chief of the Berlin weekly newspaper Wochenpost. In 1996 he took over the post of editor-in-chief of the Hamburg tabloid Hamburger Morgenpost.

In March 1998 he became editor-in-chief of Axel Springer SE's national daily newspaper Die Welt. Under his leadership, the content and visual appearance of the paper was fundamentally revised. On February 26, 2008, Axel Springer announced that the Welt Group had generated a profit for the first time.

Döpfner has been a member of the management board of Axel Springer SE since July 2000. From October 2000 he has additionally been head of the newspapers division. Since Döpfner became CEO in 2002, revenues from digital activities increased from €117m to €2,0bn with EBITDA from digital increasing from €-12m to €429m. Worldwide digital audience expanded to more than 200 million users.

Mathias Döpfner took over the leadership of Axel Springer SE during an economically difficult time. After the company made 98 million Euros less profit in the boom year of 2000 than the previous year, it had to cope with a loss of 198 million Euros for the first time in its history in the 2001 financial year.

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