Ton Geurts
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Ton Geurts, Chief Procurement Officer AkzoNobel
Ton Geurts started in 1985 as a Management Trainee Bank Mees & Hope in Rotterdam after graduating with a law degree from the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands.
In 1986 he accepted the function of Corporate Lawyer Legal Department at DSM NV. He has been working as a counsel and negotiator in the EU, USA, Latin America and Far East.
In 1992 he became a purchase manager, shaping several organizations in DSM. In 2000 he changed direction towards e-business, where for example, Ton Geurts was part of a team that built DSM’s e-business platform. Three years later, when DSM acquired Roche Pharmaceuticals’ EUR 2 billion vitamins business, he was called down to Switzerland to join the team working on integrating the unit into DSM.
Ton Geurts left DSM in August 2006, and worked behind the scenes in the last months of 2006, to join AkzoNobel as Chief Procurement Officer at the beginning of 2007.
AkzoNobel’s excellence in Sourcing has been underlined by Ton Geurts winning the Dutch procurement institute’s (NEVI) CPO of the Year Award for 2008. The theme for 2008 was ‘From purchasing to a company-wide organization strategy’. In the same week the sourcing function of AkzoNobel scooped honor for a second time, when they received the ‘ProcureCon Award for Sustainability’. during the pan-European strategic sourcing event ProcureCon 2008.