Gérard Bougniart

Gérard Bougniart was appointed chairman of the ArjoWiggins group on June 17 2004.
Born in 1946, Gérard Bougniart grew up in the village of Bienche in southern Wallonia, Beligum.
After qualifying as a manufacturing engineer, he began work in the early 70s at the Belgian affiliate of a US manufacturer of industrial ventilators.
He left the same year to join the Nivelles paper mill, south of Brussels, of the British papermaker Wiggins Teape, as Production Engineer.
It was thus in carbonless papers at the Nivelles mill that Gérard Bougniart learnt his trade through ha succession of management positions : head of the cutting department, head of planning, head of finishing, etc.
In January 1983 he became Manufacturing Manager at Nivelles; in May 1987 he was appointed Mill Manager in Virginal; and in February 1991 he returned to Nivelles as General Manager.
There he led the restructuring of the two sites, made necessary by the first signs of the decline – linked to developments in IT and printing technologies – of the market for carbonless papers.