from
Christina Kunkel
Marika Lulay almost went under while waiting for the right wave. The 58-year-old dared to do something that a company boss will usually not forgive: She completely turned the listed IT service provider GFT inside out and accepted that the share price first fell and then floundered – and not just for a few months, but for years. And that in an industry in which investors are used to things only going uphill. “An IT company that doesn’t make double-digit profits doesn’t exist!” Marika Lulay has heard this sentence many times since she took over as CEO of the Stuttgart-based company in 2017. Annoyed shareholders, impatient employees: “I was sure that the path was right. But I didn’t know whether the company would end it with me,” she said in a video conversation from her home office in the Odenwald at the beginning of October.