Leadership

Bo Hjelt

Honorary Chairman & Founder

Contact

+31 20 662 5536 bo.hjelt@cdiglobal.com

Experience & Qualifications

Bo Hjelt is a Swedish citizen born in Finland 1935, now residing in Stockholm. 

He has a higher education from Indiana University, USA (with a Swedish-American Foundation Fellowship) as well as from Switzerland: the Geneva university Hautes Etudes Commerciales (HEC) and Centre d’Etudes Industrielles (MBA). He was anofficer in the Swedish Army.  In 2019 he was made Doctor Honoris Causa at Lund University

He started his business career in the 1960s, when he held various qualified positions in Svenska Metallverken, a significant Swedish corporation within the non-ferrous metals industry, that later became part of the global Electrolux Group. Being Sales and Marketing Director, Europe,  Bo Hjelt lived and worked in Japan, France, Germany and Belgium.

In 1973, Bo Hjelt founded the globally acting M&A industrial advisory company Corporate Development International (CDI) and today CDI Global has 50 offices worldwide.  He is Honorary Chairman of CDI Global.

Bo Hjelt has been Member of the Board of a number of quoted companies and other organizations, for example Svenskar i Världen (“Swedes Overseas”), IMI Kiev, which is the first MBA school in Ukraine, and the International Federation for Spina Bifida and Hydrocephalus (IF).

He has created three Foundations: The Bo Hjelt Foundation for Spina Bifida in memory of Madeleine Hjelt (1986), The Bo and Kerstin Hjelt Foundation for research into type II Diabetes (2007) and the Bo and Allan Hjelt Art Foundation (2008).