Katharina Poehlmann is the Vice President and Head of Strategy at A.P. Moller—Maersk. Also known simply as Maersk, the shipping giant employs roughly 93,000 employees across operations in 130 countries. Maersk provides ocean and inland freight transportation in addition to associated services, such as supply chain management and port operation. With headquarters in Copenhagen, Denmark, the company has been the world’s biggest container shipping line and vessel operator since 1996. In the 2020 Forbes Global 2000, Maersk was ranked as the 622nd-largest public company in the world.
Poehlmann joined the shipping company in 2017 when Maersk's CEO, Søren Skou, established his own staff unit in a so-called CEO Office. Poehlmann's first position was to serve as head of the CEO Office, answering directly to Skou. In this role, she assisted Maersk's Group CEO in shaping the company's strategic agenda and transformation while also driving special CEO initiatives.
Based on this success, she was promoted to global head of Cold Chain Logistics, a role she served from January 2019 to March 2021. She was then promoted to Head of Strategy, a position she's held now for over two years.
More recently, Poehlmann joined Maersk's Executive Leadership Team as a VP in January 2023. The move arrived on the heels of Vincent Clerc taking over the CEO role and implementing a new organizational structure within the ranks of the Danish shipping giant. Poehlmann, in turn, has since seen a substantial increase in responsibility over the execution of Maersk’s integrator strategy.
Speaking to these changes, CEO Clerc said, "Together with the team, I look very much forward to continuing our strong momentum into the next phase of our strategy and I am excited to get to work in the new structure and together with all Maersk colleagues accelerate our business transformation.”
Prior to joining Maersk, Poehlmann spent nearly a decade in the consulting world. From 2012 to 2017, she was an associate principal at McKinsey & Company. Before that, she served as a project leader at The Boston Consulting Group from 2008 to 2012. Poehlmann received a Bachelor of Business Administration in mechanical engineering from Technical University of Munich.