Roche Holding AG Chairman Humer Says He’ll Retire in 2014

Roche Holding AG (ROG) Chairman Franz Humer said he won’t stand for re-election next year, ending more than a decade of leadership of the world’s biggest maker of cancer medicines. A successor to Humer, 66, will be nominated in the fall and will also be a non-executive chairman, maintaining the company’s split between that office and that of the chief executive officer, the company said in an e-mailed statement today. His departure means Europe’s two biggest drugmakers will replace influential chairmen in the course of a year after Novartis AG (NOVN) Chairman Daniel Vasella stepped down last month. Humer is credited as an architect of Roche’s strategy of yoking its diagnostics and drugs units together to create medicines targeted at individual patients. “That is the basis for our success today and in the future as well,” Andre Hoffmann, a spokesman for the Roche family shareholders’ voting pool, said today at the Basel, Switzerland- based company’s annual shareholder meeting. Humer told shareholders it was important for him to set his own departure date. Roche CEO Severin Schwan was voted onto the company’s supervisory board today.

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