Pretoria - Christoph Köpke, the chairman of the management board at DaimlerChrysler South Africa (DCSA), has been appointed head of the car maker's German sales organisation from the beginning of next month.
The appointment means three of the seven locally based motor manufacturers will have new people at the helm next year.
This follows the appointment last month of Ian Robertson, the managing director of BMW South Africa, as chairman and chief executive of Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, while Deborah Coleman, the chief executive and group managing director of the Ford Motor Company of Southern Africa, returns to the US to take up a new but as-yet unannounced assignment.
In addition, Mike Whitfield, the director of sales and marketing at Nissan South Africa, joins Nissan Europe from the beginning of next year to head up sales and marketing operations in Scandinavia.
Köpke takes over as management board chairman of DaimlerChrysler Vertriebsgesellschaft in Berlin, which manages the domestic sales of passenger cars and commercial vehicles under the brands Mercedes-Benz, Maybach, Chrysler, Jeep and Smart.
He will succeed Eckhard Panka, who will be retiring at the end of this month.
Köpke's successor will be Hansgeorg Niefer, who has headed Mercedes-Benz passenger car production at DaimlerChrysler's East London plant since 2002.
Köpke has been chairman of the board of management of DCSA since 1989.
He is well acquainted with sales activities and the intricacies of multibrand management having, since 1972, advanced through all the levels of sales organisation for passenger cars and commercial vehicles.
He has also served on the board of DaimlerChrysler Financial Services in South Africa.
Nico Vermeulen, the executive director of the National Association of Automobile Manufacturers of SA (Naamsa), said the appointment of local motor industry executives to international positions confirmed that the industry had excellent executive expertise.
Vermeulen said South Africa was often used as a training ground for chief executives internationally.
"Clearly it is a feather in the cap of the local industry.
"What makes South Africa so attractive as a training ground is that it is a microcosm of the challenges that top executives have to deal with worldwide," said Vermeulen.
"Unlike a lot of other countries where portfolios are a lot more focused, in South Africa they are more generalised."
Vermeulen added that Köpke was the elder statesman of the local industry.
But from Naamsa's perspective, it was sad to lose the experience of all these executives at virtually the same time, particularly with the mid-term review of the motor industry development programme scheduled to commence next year.