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About Ingo
Ingo Kretzschmar has been CEO of Thalia Bücher GmbH since 2022, when he succeeded Michael Busch as chairman of the management board. In 2025 Thalia ran 418 bookstores in Germany and Austria and employed around 7,000 people. The group is based in Hagen and holds half of Orell Füssli Thalia in Switzerland.
His career has been closely tied to the group. After an apprenticeship in wholesale and foreign trade at Douglas Holding, which then owned Thalia, he studied business at the University of Münster and graduated as Diplom-Kaufmann. In 2006 he joined as a controller at Douglas and moved on to Thalia, where he worked in assortment management, as branch and area manager and as sales director.
From 2016 he sat on the management board, responsible for Thalia's stores and other sales channels and for business with large institutional customers in Germany and Austria.