Soheil Dastyari to become new Chairman of the Executive Board of Bastei Lübbe AG

Cologne, 26 January 2022. The Supervisory Board of Bastei Lübbe AG (ISIN DE000A1X3YY0) appoints a new Chairman of the Executive Board as of 1 March 2022 and, in doing so, reorganises the responsibilities on the Company's Executive Board.

The new Chairman of the Executive Board will be Soheil Dastyari (49). In addition to managing the Cologne-based publishing house, he will be responsible for strategy, business development, strategic management of the subsidiaries, corporate communications and human resources.

Chief Financial Officer Joachim Herbst, who most recently served as Spokesman of the Executive Board, Simon Decot (Programme) and Sandra Dittert (Marketing and Sales) will form the future Executive Board together with Soheil Dastyari.

Robert Stein, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Bastei Lübbe AG, said: "The appointment of Soheil Dastyari as the new CEO further strengthens the Executive Board of Bastei Lübbe. In the course of his entrepreneurial career, he has proven that he can successfully develop media companies and is a man of ideas and content. He has a broad range of skills and experience that will benefit Bastei Lübbe as a company. I am very pleased that we have been able to win him for this important task at Bastei Lübbe and wish him every success in this."

"In recent years, the Executive Board team at Bastei Lübbe has been very successful in driving forward the growth strategy and the transformation of the company into a modern, multi-faceted publishing group. Earlier than expected, the previous Executive Board team has stabilised the Group's economic earning power and optimised the portfolio. We therefore see now as the right time to take advantage of the momentum we have achieved. I am convinced that together with Soheil Dastyari we will succeed in developing Bastei Lübbe's strengths even further - with the aim of achieving sustainable, profitable growth," Stein continued.

Soheil Dastyari can look back on a long career in a wide variety of management positions. He began his career as a brand strategist and later managing director of international communications agencies. Dastyari then moved to the Bertelsmann Group and was in charge of innovation development and corporate media at the media company Gruner + Jahr. As Managing Director of the German publishing house, he was Managing Director of Capital and the Stern Group, among others. Most recently, Dastyari was the founding CEO of the communications service provider Territory, under whose umbrella the Bertelsmann group bundled all companies in the content communications sector and restructured them on the market. Since leaving Bertelsmann, he has worked as a management consultant.

Soheil Dastyari: "The performance and progressiveness of Bastei Lübbe have impressed me very much and I want to do my part to further develop the publishing group in the right direction. I am very much looking forward to my task and to working together with my colleagues on the Executive Board and the entire Bastei Lübbe team."

About Bastei Lübbe AG:

Bastei Lübbe AG is a German trade publisher based in Cologne, specialising in the publication of books, audio books and eBooks with fiction and popular science content. The company's core business also includes periodical novel booklets. With its total of sixteen publishing brands, the corporate group currently has several thousand titles in the fiction, non-fiction and children's and youth book segments on offer. In the growing segment of hardcover fiction, the company has been one of the market leaders in Germany for many years. At the same time, Bastei Lübbe is an innovation driver in the area of digital media and exploitation channels, among other things through the production of thousands of audio and eBooks.

For the 2020/2021 fiscal year, the Bastei Lübbe Group reports annual sales of around 93 million euros. Bastei Lübbe AG is one of the largest medium-sized companies in the German publishing industry. Since 2013, the company's shares have been listed in the Prime Standard of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange (WKN A1X3YY, ISIN DE000A1X3YY0). Further information can be found at www.luebbe.de.

Contact Bastei Lübbe AG:

Barbara Fischer
Head of Press and Public Relations
Phone: +49 (0)221 8200 2850
E-mail: barbara.fischer@luebbe.de