Shoe expert was director at PFI and most recently at PFI Fareast
At the end of the year, Dr. Gerhard Nickolaus, Director of PFI Fareast Ltd., will retire from active professional life. The doctor of chemistry came to PFI Pirmasens in 1983 and was appointed director in 2001. During this time he has made an outstanding name for himself. “You can rightly be described as a luminary in the shoe and leather industry. “With your foresight, you have achieved great things not only in this country, but also in Asia,” says PFI Chairman Michael Tackenberg, emphasizing his global connections in addition to his technical expertise.
“I am of course thinking of your current sphere of activity and 40 years of experience in production facilities throughout Asia,” said Tackenberg, referring to his pioneering work and the founding of PFI Hong Kong. Since 2014, after leaving Pirmasens, Dr. Gerhard Nickolaus as director of what later became PFI Fareast Ltd. renamed institute. The founding of PFI Türkiye was also his initiative. In addition, it is thanks to his initiative, among other things, that there is an International Shoe Competence Center in Pirmasens called the ISC. Further testing, training and education centers were set up in Asia based on this model.
Thanks to his expertise, Dr. Gerhard Nickolaus has an excellent reputation as a consultant for the technical optimization of production processes. For many years he was a lecturer in leather and shoe technology at the Kaiserslautern University of Applied Sciences, and was also chairman of German, European and international standardization committees such as ISO and EN. His successor at PFI Fareast will be Candice Wang; in Germany, the PFI and ISC institutes have been headed by Dr. Kerstin Schulte led.
