International Panel Meeting

Every year we organise a panel meeting as part of the WIBF’s International Business Conferences. This year’s discussion topics are as follow: 

"How do MNCs make FDI decisions with a focus on country-specific locational factors?" 

And, 

"What is the role of financial institutions to support SME internationalisation?"

Ours panellists are usually businessmen and/or academics involved in international business as practitioners or researchers. This year's panelists' short bios are below.

The meeting will be moderated by Prof. Dr. Emin Akcaoglu and Prof. Dr. Rainer Wehner.

Gürhan Güven
Gürhan Güven

Gürhan Güven

Gürhan Güven was born and raised in Hof in the federal state of Bavaria, Germany. He studied industrial engineering at Hochschule Hof. Later he moved to Izmir as an expatriate Sales & Marketing Director for the Turkish subsidiary of NETZSCH, the 6th-generation family-owned machine producer in Germany. After working for NETZSCH for five years, he left the company, and changed his professional environment from machine business to food business. For the last five years, Mr. Güven has been the Chairman of the Executive Board & CEO of FERSAN which is the market and innovation leader in the Turkish vinegar market with around 200 employees, and a global pickle supplier of McDonald‘s. FERSAN belongs to the 4th-generation family-owned DEVELEY Group in Germany. The DEVELEY Group operates in 10 countries with 19 factories and exports its products to more than 60 countries.

Dr. Martin G. Kaspar
Dr. Martin G. Kaspar

Dr. Martin G. Kaspar

As Head of Corporate Development of Fränkische Industrial Pipes, a German Mittelstand’s company and hidden champion in the automotive industry, Dr. Martin G. Kaspar is primarily responsible for internationalization projects (France, Morocco, Mexico, Romania, China, India, Switzerland, Brazil, UAE, the US and the UK) in a greenfield as well as an M&A-context.

He recently completed his part-time PhD at Durham University on the role of Investment Promotion Agencies (IPA) on the location-decision making process of medium sized companies. His qualitative PhD thesis was completed in close cooperation with fellow corporates, national and sub-nationals IPAs, international organizations (UNCTAD, IMF, MIGA, ILO) as well as professional bodies in the FDI field (e.g. WAIPA). Invitations to speak at Development Bank -, IPA- and Chamber of Commerce - conferences as well as during one of the sessions of the WEF E15 project group on FDI followed. Martin is a regular attendee at the BoKoWiTa, bilateral multi-party coordination meetings, and has twice been invited to Ditchley.

Working at the intersection of academic and operational international business, foreign direct investment and hands-on decision-making processes in internationalization projects within the Mittelstand environment, results in Dr. Martin Kaspar having “a foot in both camps” in this topic.

Prof. Dr. Wimboh Santoso
Prof. Dr. Wimboh Santoso

Prof. Dr. Wimboh Santoso

Professor Santoso is the Chairman of the Indonesia Financial Services Authority. He started his career as a banking supervisor at Bank Indonesia. He worked as Director of Banking Research and Regulation at Bank Indonesia between 2010 and 2012. Later, he was appointed as Head of Bank Indonesia Representative in New York, before joining the International Monetary Fund to take an executive director’s seat there. Since 2015, Professor Santoso has been the President Commissioner at PT Bank Mandiri (Persero) Tbk, and in 2016, he also became Director of the Indonesian Banking Development Institute. Professor Santoso was a member of Bank Indonesia delegation for a G20 meeting in 2010, and in the same year he also represented the Central Bank at the Financial Stability Board and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. Then in 2014, he co-chaired the Asean Banking Integration Framework. He has also been teaching at leading universities in Indonesia for both undergraduate and postgraduate courses. His publications include Effective Financial System Stability Framework (2007), the Impact of Global Liquidity on Financial Landscapes and Risk in the ASEAN-5 Countries (2007), Risk Profile of Households and the Impact on Financial Stability (2009) among many others. Professor Santoso has an MBA from the University of Illinois (1993), and a PhD in Financial Economics from Loughborough University (1999).

Kurt Treumann
Kurt Treumann

Kurt Treumann

Kurt Treumann started his career in private German enterprises. Later he moved to the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce (IHK), for which he has been working for the last twenty-six years. He studied economics at Verwaltungs und Wirtschaftsakademie Wuerzburg (VWA) and competed his studies as Betriebswirt (VWA) in 1999. Kurt Treumann started to work for the IHK as a consultant for International Affairs. In 2012 he became Referent, and he has been the Director for International Affairs / Bereichsleiter International since 2014. Mr. Kurt Treumann is responsible for the promotion of internationalization of Mainfranconian companies through the provision of various types of services such as export- and import consultancies, market development projects, events and meetings, international business travels, certification, and confirmation of special documents relating to foreign businesses. Together with Bayern International, a sister organisation of Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Wirtschaft, Landesentwicklung und Energie, he has developed, organized and attended a number of official participations at international trade fairs for SMEs all over the world.

His employer, the IHK Wuerzburg-Schweinfurt, operates within the service network of 9 Bavarian IHKs and 79 IHKs all over Germany, and 140 offices of the German Chambers of Commerce Abroad (AHK) in 92 countries. It has got 66.000 members. The export-quote of Mainfranconia is over 43 percent.