Horst W. Garbrecht has been appointed as Chief Operating Officer in Europe for the parent company of Metabo and HiKOKI, KOKI Holdings.

Garbrecht takes on his new role in parallel with his function as Chief Executive Officer of the Nürtingen-based Metabo GmbH.

At the same time, KOKI Holding’s new European headquarters will be established in Nürtingen, Germany; making the city the European home to KOKI’s two core brands HiKOKI and Metabo.

Garbrecht studied mechanical and energy engineering at Esslingen University and started his professional life at Mercedes. He then moved to the power-tool industry with manufacturer Festool in 1992. He later joined the Swedish machine builder Atlas Copco before becoming Managing Director of AEG Milwaukee, a member of the TTI Group. He has been CEO of Metabo since 2009, where he initiated a change of strategy, focusing on professional users in trade and industry in the development, production and distribution of Metabo´s product and solution offers. As COOE/Senior Vice President, Garbrecht will sit on the executive board of KOKI Holdings, from October 2019 onwards.

‘We were looking for the best candidate for the role of COOE. Fortunately, we didn’t have to go very far because we already had him at KOKI Holdings,’ explains Atsushi Morisawa, CEO of KOKI Holdings. ‘With his technical background as an engineer, his decades of experience inside and outside the industry and his exceptional management skills, Horst Garbrecht is a major player in the market. All of that makes him the perfect COOE for KOKI Holdings.’

HiKOKI power tools were known by the Hitachi brand name until October 2018. This change of name was a result of KOKI Holdings splitting off from the Japanese Hitachi Group.