Christoph Franz

Christoph Franz (born 1960 in Frankfurt) is a German engineer and manager who was chief executive of the airline group Lufthansa from 2011 to 2014. He studied industrial engineering at the Technical University of Darmstadt, completed a doctorate there and did research at the University of California, Berkeley. He joined Lufthansa in 1990, moved to the railway operator Deutsche Bahn in 1994 and was chief executive of Swiss International Air Lines from 2004 to 2009. At Lufthansa he sought to answer the budget airlines by removing duplication between its short-haul services and Germanwings, and the group sold its British subsidiary bmi to International Airlines Group. He left in 2014 to become chairman of the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche, on whose board he had sat since 2011.