Curriculum vitae

Oliver Frese has been the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Koelnmesse GmbH since 2020 and is responsible for the operational trade fair business in Cologne and the global brand management of the international portfolio.

After graduating with a degree in social science in 1995, he began his professional career as an assistant to the management board at Richard Kühn/Perfekta Dienstleistungen GmbH in Burgwedel near Hanover.

From there, he moved to DeTe Immobilien und Service GmbH, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom AG, in 1997 and took over as head of marketing and internal sales in 1998.

From 2000 to 2004, Oliver Frese was marketing manager for the Baden-Württemberg energy group EnBW in Hanover and Stuttgart. He joined the Deutsche Messe AG in Hanover in 2004 and was appointed to its Executive Board in 2013.

In 2019, Oliver Frese worked as an independent management consultant before Koelnmesse GmbH appointed him to the Management Board in 2020.

As COO of Koelnmesse, he is responsible for numerous world-leading trade fairs as part of his responsibility for the company’s global portfolio of events, which are attended by around 43,000 exhibiting companies from around 125 countries and visitors from over 200 countries every year.

He is also in charge of the services, sales and marketing communication departments, in addition to the Technical Event Organisation department.

Since taking office, Oliver Frese has been particularly concerned with the digitalisation of the Cologne exhibition company, which has been given a major boost by the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. He drove forward the development of digital platforms, which gave rise to digital value creation models that the company continues to expand even after the pandemic.

With a clear vision for customer-centric event organisation, he aligned the market-oriented areas of Sales, Services and Marketing Communication with a new operating model. This model enables Koelnmesse to better harmonise its marketing and sales messages and consistently focus all activities on the individual needs of its customers.

Oliver Frese lives with his partner in Cologne and has two adult children.

As of April 2025