Dr. Claude Béglé

Dr. Claude Béglé is a Swiss entrepreneur whose career of more than forty years has taken him across a hundred countries - from Nepal in the 1970s to the executive boards of Deutsche Post, and from the Red Cross to the corridors of the Swiss Federal Parliament. Today, he channels that experience into building companies with measurable environmental and public health impact.

In a changing world: find the right answers, commit, and act.

Claude Béglé began his career not in business, but on the ground. Seconded by the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, he taught international politics at the University of Kathmandu in Nepal, before joining the International Committee of the Red Cross as a delegate in conflict zones in Lebanon and Rhodesia. Learning to navigate crises with impartiality and no institutional safety net left a permanent mark on how he approaches complex organisations.

He then spent fourteen years at Nestlé across nine countries - from Nigeria to Czechoslovakia - working through marketing, sales, R&D, mergers and acquisitions, and general management. That breadth taught him to operate across radically different contexts: developing markets, post-communist economies, multinationals in transition. Philip Morris subsequently recruited him to run its Polish operations at the precise moment the country was transitioning to a market economy.

In 1997, he joined TNT Express as Vice President for Europe, responsible for more than fifty countries. He then became Deputy CEO of GeoPost and Chairman of the DPD Group in Germany - the international parcel and logistics division of La Poste France - leading up to 26,000 employees and a turnover of €1.7 billion. In 2005, he took charge of DHL Express for Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Eastern Europe within Deutsche Post, overseeing approximately 40,000 employees and revenues of $8 billion, while also serving on the group's global executive committee.

In 2008, the Swiss Federal Council appointed him Chairman of the Board of La Poste Suisse at a moment of deep structural upheaval: traditional mail volumes were collapsing and the business model needed reinventing. He steered the group toward a banking licence for PostFinance and oriented strategy toward high-value digital services. This experience became the subject of his book Un colis piégé (2018, Éditions Favre) - an account of the inner workings of Swiss public institutions.

Since 2019, Claude Béglé has led SymbioSwiss, an entrepreneurial vehicle he founded to incubate and develop impact-driven startups. Its flagship company, Swiss NeWater, has developed a technology that produces eighteen eco-friendly cleaning and disinfection formulas on-site - without imported chemicals - simultaneously addressing two United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: improving public health and reducing pollution. He also chairs Peter Lang Group, an academic publisher issuing more than 1,500 titles a year, and serves as an ambassador of Arnold Schwarzenegger's R20 Foundation, which supports regional governments in delivering climate solutions. He is also a member of the Clinton Global Initiative.

Between 2015 and 2019, Claude Béglé sat as a member of the Swiss National Council - the lower house of the Federal Parliament - on the Committee on Foreign Policy. He filed more than a hundred parliamentary interventions on topics ranging from cybersecurity to international cooperation, fourteen of which were taken up by the Federal Council. On 12 March 2025, he received five votes in a Federal Council election.

A holder of a doctorate in economics, a master's in law, and a master's in international relations from the Universities of Lausanne and Geneva, Claude Béglé is married to a Colombian physician and is the father of six children based across Paris, the United States, China, and Switzerland - a family geography that reflects the life he has built.