Ron Sommer

Ron Sommer (born July 29, 1949 in Haifa, Israel, as Aaron Lebowitsch) is a manager and former CEO of Deutsche Telekom. Sommer is Chairman of the International Advisory Council of the Russian Sistema Group, where he was elected to the Executive Board in June 2005. Life Sommer was born in 1949 in Haifa, Israel, the son of Jewish parents. His mother had fled Bessarabia (now Moldavia) in 1943 and his father had emigrated from Würzburg to Palestine in 1935. After his parents separated, Sommer moved with his mother and her new partner to Vienna, where he adopted the name of his stepfather, studying mathematics at the University of Vienna and was awarded a doctorate at the age of 21 in 1971 with the title "Limit theorems on the entropy of number-theoretic transformations." Sommer's PhD supervisor was . Career Nixdorf & Sony Sommer moved to New York at the age of 24 to work for Q1 Corp., a small computer company that was taken over in 1974 by the German Nixdorf Computer AG. After a brief stopover in Germany, he became head of the Nixdorf branch in Paris for two years in 1977, later heading overseas. In 1980 Sommer moved to the Japanese Sony Group, where ten years later he became the executive chair in the United States and in 1993 President and COO of Sony Europe.