Extending his role within Harman Professional, Andy Trott has been made responsible for AKG, alongside being President of Harman’s mixer business Soundcraft Studer. Stefan Gubi, who has headed up AKG or the past five years, is to return to the telecom industry – from which he joined AKG – at the end of June.
Andy Trott, has been behind the ‘digitalisation’ of Soundcraft Studer’s business since he joined in early 2003. ‘Having a background as a digital engineer and a recording musician I am absolutely thrilled at the prospect of leading another legendary name in the audio industry,’ he says. ‘AKG has always been a brand I have revered and I can see many synergies with the new product development programmes we have been pursuing in Soundcraft Studer.
‘Harman’s strategy is to develop centres of excellence and by bringing our microphone and headphone business closer together with our mixer brands, we will be able to capitalise on engineering innovations currently under way in both camps – for example, we have several digital programmes in place that can benefit from sharing one another’s creativity.’
The new structure will incur minimal changes: ‘We will obviously look for efficiencies and make sensible changes, but AKG is running well, much to the credit of Stefan’s work over the past four years,’ Trott says. ‘Nigel Beaumont, our VP of Operations, has been running our manufacturing operations across all three brands for almost a year now and the marketing teams, in line with all Harman Professional brands, work together on a daily basis so the businesses are comfortable working together.’
Accepting his new appointment in the same year as AKG received a coveted Technical Grammy Award, Trott is keen to point out that his strategy is to spearhead growth: ‘Like Studer, AKG has more than 60 years of proud history valued by staff, distributors and customers alike, and this is something we want to protect as we pioneer new technologies – no other brands can offer such an integrated set of possibilities for future products as we can.’
