Portrait of Kevin Schwutke

Kevin Schwutke

Building, scaling and restructuring businesses: scaling up for growth, and scaling down with discipline when markets turn.

Senior Vice President & ProkuristARRI GroupMunich

  • ~20Years of experience
  • 10+Years of international assignments
  • 2Co-founded: ARRI Solutions, Volkswagen ClimatePartner
  • 3Companies, reporting directly to the CEO
Executive profile (PDF)

About

Strategy that becomes operating reality.

I am Senior Vice President and Authorized Signatory (Prokurist) at ARRI, reporting to the Management Board. I lead corporate development, brand and new business at group level and serve as Press Spokesperson on strategic and corporate topics.

Within 18 months, I founded and scaled Business Unit Solutions into a double-digit-million-euro revenue platform. I have also driven group-level restructuring and portfolio measures, including divestitures and capacity adjustments, scaling businesses up and scaling them down in times of crisis.

My experience spans media technology, automotive, industrial clients, management consulting and sustainability scale-ups, including private-equity-backed companies in the U.S. and Europe. Based in Germany, with more than ten years in the USA, I previously served as CSO at ClimatePartner and as Associate Partner at Porsche Consulting in Atlanta and Silicon Valley, where, as a founding member of the U.S. office, I drove post-merger integration and operational transformations.

I create the most value where strategy has to become operating reality, particularly in complex, brand-critical, and industrially or technologically demanding environments.

What I bring

Build, realign, internationalize.

Build & scale

New businesses, from zero to scale

Founded and scaled ARRI’s Business Unit Solutions into a double-digit-million-euro revenue platform within 18 months.

Restructure & realign

Scaling down with discipline

Group-level restructuring and portfolio measures, including divestitures and capacity adjustments, to realign a business responsibly when its market contracts.

Internationalize

Market entry and cross-border delivery

More than ten years in the USA. Founding team of Porsche Consulting’s U.S. business in Atlanta and Silicon Valley; earlier international assignments at Bosch.

Governance & judgment

A governance perspective, grounded in operations

As Prokurist and Press Spokesperson, I work with the responsibilities of signing authority and public communication: liability, risk, reporting, and communication with stakeholders and business media.

Career

Two decades across technology, industry and consulting.

  1. ARRI

    SVP Corporate Development, Brand & New Business

    2025 – today

    ARRI Group · Munich

    • Before: SVP Business Unit Solutions (2023 – 2024): founded and scaled ARRI Solutions
    • Prokurist (Authorized Signatory) & Press Spokesperson
  2. ClimatePartner

    Chief Strategy Officer & Head of Global Customer Management

    2021 – 2022

    ClimatePartner · Munich

  3. Porsche Consulting

    Associate Partner

    2007 – 2020

    Porsche Consulting · Stuttgart · Atlanta · Silicon Valley

    • Founding team of the U.S. offices
  4. Bosch

    Operational Excellence

    2004 – 2006

    Robert Bosch · Germany · Italy · Tunisia · USA

  5. BMW Group

    Engineering

    2003

    BMW Group · Munich

  6. Bundeswehr

    Military service

    2001 – 2002

    Bundeswehr

Education
Dipl.-Ing. (FH) Mechanical Engineering & Computer Science, Hochschule Trier (grade 1.0)
Emory University, Atlanta: Executive education in Transformational Leadership (2018–2019)

Selected work

Building up, realigning, partnering.

Aerial view of Al-Hisn Big Time Studios near Riyadh
Al-Hisn Big Time Studios, Riyadh · © AlHisnBigTimeStudios 2025, via ARRI
01 / 05

ARRI Solutions

ARRI Group · New business unit · 2023 – 2024

In March 2023, ARRI elevated Solutions to its own business unit, alongside Camera Systems, Lighting and Rental. ARRI Solutions designs, builds and operates virtual production environments and delivers studio infrastructure and media workflows end to end, from consulting to turnkey installation. Projects include the 1,200 m² Gran Canaria Studios stage with VCI and ROE Visual, one of Europe’s largest VP stages, and the BaViPro pilot shoot at Bavaria Studios, funded by the Bavarian State Ministry for Digital Affairs. The largest project in this period was Al-Hisn Big Time Studios near Riyadh, designed, planned and built by ARRI and Sela for Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority (GEA) and inaugurated in November 2024.

Role
Senior Vice President & Head of Business Unit Solutions, responsible for the unit’s strategic and commercial direction, with a technical co-lead. Responsible for ARRI’s partnership with GEA and Sela on Al-Hisn.
Result
Founded and scaled into a double-digit-million-euro revenue platform within 18 months. Al-Hisn received the region’s first ARRI Stage Accreditation at Joy Forum 2025.
ARRI headquarters ARRIAL in Munich, a dark brick building with a glass entrance wing
ARRI headquarters (ARRIAL), Munich · Photo: Heiko Meyer/ARRI, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
02 / 05

Restructuring & portfolio realignment, ARRI Group

ARRI Group · Corporate development & communications · 2025 –

Like much of the film industry, ARRI is adapting to lasting shifts in market demand by sharpening its focus on developing, producing and commercializing camera, lighting and software-based technologies. Publicly announced steps include the sale of the entertainment-lighting subsidiary Claypaky to EK Inc. (2025); the centralization of lighting R&D and product management at the Munich headquarters, with operations at two Bavarian sites discontinued by the end of 2025; and the agreed sale of the global rental activities to a management buy-out backed by H2 Equity Partners (2026).

Role
Group-level corporate development and Press Spokesperson: driving restructuring and portfolio measures, including divestitures and capacity adjustments, and representing the realignment to international business media.
Status
Claypaky sale completed in September 2025; rental divestiture agreed in July 2026; transformation ongoing.
Two men building a brick wall in a climate project region
Climate project fieldwork · Image via volkswagen-climatepartner.com
03 / 05

Volkswagen ClimatePartner

ClimatePartner × Volkswagen · Joint venture · 2022

Volkswagen ClimatePartner GmbH was founded in Munich in 2022 as a joint venture of VW Kraftwerk GmbH (the Volkswagen Group’s energy and decarbonisation subsidiary) and ClimatePartner, with operations starting in March 2022. Its purpose is to identify, develop and finance high-quality carbon projects, with both partners sharing the resulting credits; the focus is forest and land use, renewable energy, methane avoidance and mobility, certified to recognised standards such as VCS and Gold Standard. It was set up while ClimatePartner was expanding internationally, backed by a growth equity investment from Vitruvian Partners (December 2021).

Role
Co-founder of the joint venture as Chief Strategy Officer & Head of Global Customer Management at ClimatePartner.
Result
16 climate projects completed or significantly advanced in the founding year. The joint venture continues to operate and today reports 25 projects concluded and running in 18 countries, with more than 2.2 million hectares in restoration and conservation.
Aerial view of One Porsche Drive, Porsche’s North American headquarters in Atlanta
One Porsche Drive, Atlanta · Photo: Tony Webster, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
04 / 05

Porsche Consulting U.S.

Porsche Consulting, Inc. · Market entry · 2011 – 2020

Porsche Consulting, Inc. officially opened in Atlanta in December 2011 as the firm’s first U.S. office and its fourth internationally. Since January 2015, it has been based at One Porsche Drive, Porsche’s North American headquarters; a second office followed in Belmont, Silicon Valley, in November 2018. Fittingly, One Porsche Drive appeared on screen as the Avengers headquarters in Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War and Spider-Man: Homecoming.

Role
Founding team member, later Associate Partner: post-merger integration and operational transformation programs for clients.
Result
Market entry and ramp-up of the U.S. business to around 60 people across two offices.
Selected results
  • U.S. automotive OEM (R&D): triple-digit million dollar savings identified across 4 model lines; steering committee with Chief R&D and Chief Procurement Officer, 50+ person project house.
  • Energy company: production lead time cut from 18 to 6 months.
  • Industrial supplier (80,000 employees): global continuous improvement organization of 300 people, piloted in the U.S., Germany and Slovakia.
  • U.S. automotive OEM: future sales model for an EV launch; 120 team members, CEO-level steering.
Whitepaper visual: a car drawn as a circuit board, with binary digits rising from it
Cover: Synopsys / Porsche Consulting, 2019
05 / 05

Synopsys × Porsche Consulting: Revolutionizing Automotive Development for the Digital Future

Porsche Consulting, Inc. × Synopsys · Whitepaper · 2019

The jointly developed whitepaper, announced in December 2019, addresses a core challenge of electrified, connected and autonomous vehicles: increasingly complex electronic hardware and software architectures, from the system-on-chip (SoC) to the ECU to the vehicle. It describes a development framework that integrates Synopsys’ Triple Shift-Left approach into existing automotive development organizations by applying Porsche Consulting’s systems engineering principles. According to the companies, this lets OEMs build safety and security into automotive SoC designs faster with automotive-grade IP, start software development up to 18 months earlier with virtual prototyping, and assess software security and quality throughout development and across the supply chain.

Role
Co-author on the Porsche Consulting side, together with Dr. Burkhard Huhnke (Vice President of Automotive, Synopsys).
Result
Announced by Synopsys in December 2019, covered by eeNews Europe and republished on Semiconductor Engineering in January 2020.

Perspective

Notes on transformation.

Perspective

Scaling down is a leadership skill, too

Growth gets the attention; contraction tests an organization. What it takes to realign a business when its market shrinks: deciding early, protecting the core, and treating people and partners with respect.

Perspective

Building a new business inside a 100-year-old company

A new unit inside an established brand needs the speed of a start-up and the trust of the core at the same time. Lessons from building ARRI Solutions on mandate, partners and focus.

Perspective

When intelligence becomes abundant: what leaders still own

As AI capability scales faster than organizations can adapt, strategy, operating models and governance have to be rethought, from how decisions are prepared to how risk is reported. What does not scale away is leadership responsibility: judgment, accountability and the trust of people, customers and partners.

Perspective

Climate action as operating discipline, not reporting exercise

Decarbonization and resilience matter when they are built into products, supply chains and capital allocation. With regulation shifting, the companies that win treat climate as a business case and a risk topic, not a label.

Press & speaking

On stage and in the press.

Beyond work

Outside the office.

Animal welfare

Volunteer with Georgia Jack Russell Rescue from 2013 to 2020 (behavioral assessment, adoption and training). Member of the German Animal Welfare Federation (Deutscher Tierschutzbund) since 2023.

Ju-Jutsu

17 years of Ju-Jutsu, black belt; trained adults and children in self-defense as an instructor.

Philosophy

A long-standing interest in judgment and decision-making.

Networks Member of the Hollywood Professional Association (HPA) and of the QX Quarterly Crossing network.

Contact

Get in touch

For press enquiries, speaking invitations and professional exchange, LinkedIn is the most direct channel.

Open to exchange on strategy, transformation and advisory topics.

Connect on LinkedIn contact@kevinschwutke.com Executive profile (PDF)