Leadership Moves
Carlos Chudek to lead operations at Bosch Mobility Americas; Christopher Prediger to steer computing solutions
Bosch Mobility has appointed Carlos Chudek to lead Americas operations including manufacturing and supply chain, as Hanns Bernd Ketteler retires. Christopher Prediger will lead cross-domain computing solutions, signalling a sharper focus on manufacturing strategy, software-defined vehicles and profitable regional growth.
Bosch Mobility has announced two leadership appointments for its Americas region, the kind of organisational signalling that, on closer inspection, reveals a great deal about where the company intends to direct its energy.
Carlos Chudek will take on responsibility for operations across Bosch Mobility Americas from 1 July, overseeing regional manufacturing and supply chain management, alongside his existing Vehicle Motion role, a post he has held since December 2025 and includes hardware and software across braking, steering, and chassis control. In operations he succeeds Dr Hanns Bernd Ketteler, who led operations since 2024 as executive vice-president for operations.
Christopher Prediger, meanwhile, takes on the role of regional president, Americas for the Cross-Domain Computing Solutions division. The announcements were made from the company's American headquarters in Farmington Hills and Plymouth, Michigan.
The scale of what Chudek now oversees
These moves do not take place against a backdrop of crisis or contraction. Bosch Mobility generated $12.4 billion in sales across the Americas in 2025, with the Mobility sector as a whole producing $63 billion globally, making it the single largest business division within the Bosch Group.
Carlos and Christopher are proven leaders who bring strong experience and drive to our teams. Their leadership in key areas of our portfolio support our goals to continue securing profitable growth for Bosch Mobility in the Americas as part of our global strategy
The wider Group reported sales of €91 billion ($106 billion) in 2025, employing roughly 413,000 people worldwide. In North America specifically, Bosch maintains around 38,000 associates across more than 100 locations, with consolidated regional sales of $18.7 billion.
Paul Thomas, president of Bosch in North America and president of Bosch Mobility Americas, was direct in his assessment of the changes. "Carlos and Christopher are proven leaders who bring strong experience and drive to our teams," he said. "Their leadership in key areas of our portfolio support our goals to continue securing profitable growth for Bosch Mobility in the Americas as part of our global strategy."
Hanns Bernd Ketteler, who will retire after more than three decades with Bosch, had been a strong proponent of cross-functional collaboration to enhance manufacturing operations and product launches. Speaking at the Automotive Manufacturing North America conference in Dearborn, Michigan in October last year, he stressed how close coordination across departments, design-for-manufacturing principles, as well as simultaneous engineering and digitalisation were driving change and gains across Bosch operations.
“Our industry is in a big phase of change — and it’s about speed,” said Ketteler in a video interview on the sidelines of the event. “We must be lean, fast and efficient to compete with the pace of new technologies such as electrification and automated driving.”
Chudek's operational brief and what lies behind it
Chudek brings to his expanded role a career biography that reads as a tour of Bosch's global manufacturing complexity. Having joined the company in 2003, he has held positions in Germany and Hungary before moving into leadership roles in Mexico and China.
Most recently, he served as a senior vice president and technical plant manager for the Bosch Mobility Electronics facility in Juarez, Mexico, where the imperatives of cross-border operational efficiency and exacting quality standards are daily realities.
Before Juarez, he served as vice president of manufacturing with responsibility for production lines supporting advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and passenger safety technologies.
His time at Bosch Rexroth in Beijing as a technical director and production manager brought further industrial breadth. The cumulative effect is a leader whose instincts for manufacturing strategy have been shaped by four countries, multiple product categories and the full span of Bosch's operational culture.
As head of Americas operations, his task is to coordinate manufacturing strategy and the physical footprint of Bosch Mobility across the hemisphere, while simultaneously guiding the Vehicle Motion division, a portfolio spanning braking, steering, vehicle motion software, occupant safety systems and vehicle dynamic sensors.
Investing in American soil
Chudek's early actions in his Vehicle Motion role offer a preview of his operational philosophy. He has already overseen local investment decisions directing additional programme funding into Bosch manufacturing facilities in Charleston, South Carolina and Florence, Kentucky.
At a time when the reshoring of industrial capacity has moved from policy aspiration to commercial imperative, these investments carry weight that extends well beyond their immediate manufacturing rationale. The Vehicle Motion division he continues to lead covers product lines that remain indispensable regardless of how vehicle powertrains evolve, a point of strategic stability that few tier-one suppliers can so confidently claim.
Prediger and the software-defined frontier
If Chudek's appointment speaks to the enduring importance of physical manufacturing, Prediger's represents Bosch's answer to a different kind of competitive pressure. The Cross-Domain Computing Solutions division occupies precisely the territory that automotive suppliers most urgently need to command.
Its portfolio spans exterior and interior sensors, high-performance vehicle computers, and the software and service architectures that enable automated driving, AI-defined vehicles and new approaches to mobility services.
Prediger joined Bosch in 2011 through its management training programme in Germany and has since built a career that blends technology, commercial and financial leadership with unusual coherence. His most recent role, as vice president and regional business unit lead for Compute Performance within the division, placed him at the centre of one of the year's more significant product launches.
He oversaw the North American debut of Bosch's AI Cockpit at CES 2026, a product that embodies the convergence of artificial intelligence, user experience design and vehicle architecture now defining the competitive frontier for tier-one suppliers.
His prior role as a controlling lead for Automotive Electronics, with responsibility for financial strategy and business performance, gives him an unusually rounded perspective for a technology-facing brief.
What two appointments reveal
Taken together, the promotions sketch the outline of a company managing its own duality with deliberate care. Bosch Mobility is simultaneously one of the world's great manufacturing operations and an increasingly assertive technology company, and the tension between those two identities is neither new nor easily resolved.
Placing Chudek across both Vehicle Motion and Americas operations signals that manufacturing discipline and strategic footprint planning are being treated as a single, unified responsibility rather than parallel lines of management. Elevating Prediger to a regional presidential role for computing solutions signals that software and artificial intelligence are now being treated as a commercial business in their own right, not as a technical adjunct to the hardware divisions.
The $12.4 billion in Americas sales provides the financial platform. Whether the two appointments can translate that platform into the profitable growth Thomas is seeking will depend, in no small part, on how well the operational and technological halves of Bosch Mobility learn to move in step.
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