Andreas Müller

Andreas Müller is, in a sense, the opposite of the founder you usually meet on this show. He did not start a company; he has spent his whole working life inside one. Müller joined Georg Fischer in 1995, trained not as an engineer but as a business economist in Constance, Germany, and then climbed the unglamorous finance ladder, controlling, then chief financial officer of the casting division, then CFO of the whole group, before taking over as CEO in 2019. When he describes GF, you can hear the long view of someone who has watched it from the inside for three decades, and a small personal detail he lets slip explains some of that loyalty: his father-in-law spent 45 years at the same company.

Georg Fischer itself is the real character here, and Müller frames it with the line the whole episode hangs on. GF was founded in 1802, which makes it older than most countries' railways, and yet Müller insists the founder's instinct is still in the building. "If you look at the market cap today, we are a pretty old unicorn," he says, and the joke carries a real strategy underneath it. A 222-year-old company that still behaves like a start-up is exactly the pitch GF makes to the young, cash-poor deep-tech firms it wants to back.

Andreas Müller's actual bet is about scale, and it is a genuinely useful idea for anyone trying to understand why hard water and climate technology takes so long to arrive. A clever new process, Müller argues, gets to market far faster when you bolt it onto a company that already has factories, engineers and customers on every continent, and GF runs 17 fabrication centres in its piping business alone. In water specifically, the clearest example he gives is Oxford Flow, a spin-out from Oxford that GF is industrialising to better manage pressure in city water networks, because managing pressure is one of the cheapest ways to stop water leaking out of the pipes on its way to your tap. The same logic pushes GF into water and adjacent climate technology, including lithium, where its piping and skids feed the extraction plants the electric-car boom depends on.

Andreas Müller is unusually blunt about the limits of the green story, and this is where his finance background shows. "Sustainability can only be sustainable if it is making commercial sense," he says, and he means it as a warning against the idea that a greener product is allowed to be a worse or pricier one. For a newcomer to the water sector, that is the single most useful sentence in the interview, because it is the test that decides which climate technologies actually get bought and which ones quietly die in a pilot. It is also why he is candid that GF does not try to swallow every start-up it admires: absorbing a young company into a 19,000-person group, he admits, is not always the right move.

And then there is the human turn that you do not get from a corporate biography. Early in his career, freshly married and with a baby son, Andreas Müller was asked to move his family to Australia to integrate a business GF had just bought, on a 24-hour journey back when that still meant leaving your whole life behind. He took it, and you can tell it shaped how he leads now, because the thing he keeps coming back to is being out in the markets rather than behind a desk. "You cannot run a company not being out in the markets," he says, and for the head of a two-century-old Swiss institution, that restlessness is probably the most start-up thing about him.

“We want to be bold on new opportunities, but we also have to accept if a new opportunity doesn't turn into success, stop it. Stop it is a very important statement. It's much easier to keep things going, but you have to stop it, because then you have the resources to go into something new.”