Inside the mind of Bosch’s Jan Brockmann

In 2023, Europe lost its nerve.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had redrawn the continent’s energy map. Gas prices surged. Governments accelerated the shift towards electrification. Consumers rushed to buy heat pumps. Almost overnight, demand exploded.

For Europe’s heating industry, it looked like a once-in-a-generation opportunity. Factories expanded. Production lines stretched. Components were secured. Across boardrooms, caution suddenly looked expensive. Jan Brockmann, CEO of Bosch Home Comfort Group, watched the same numbers everyone else did. The same forecasts. The same soaring demand. Then he stepped harder on the accelerator: more capacity, more components, more ambition.

Looking back, Brockmann doesn’t dispute the need to invest. What bothers him is something subtler. Somewhere between responding to demand and responding to everybody else responding to demand, the line had blurred.

Then the market turned. Demand cooled. Inventory piled up. Capacity built for a boom suddenly looked excessive. The industry’s hottest opportunity had produced a cold hangover.

Brockmann starts with himself. 

“I made the error to go with the flow,” he says.

His mistake, Brockmann says, was going “full pedal” on capacity and buying components when another option existed: accept a temporary loss of market share, wait and play the downturn.

When I asked whether CEOs suffer from FOMO too, Brockmann smiles. 

“Sure, sure,” he says.

That small confession tells you quite a bit about the man sitting across the table. Over the next 90 minutes, Brockmann talks freely about decisions, including the ones he got wrong. About data and instinct. Patience. Loneliness. And India, where he has arrived with an ambition that leaves little room for corporate ambiguity.

MBA AND THE IMPERFECT ENGINEER

It is a humid morning in the last week of July. Inside the Pullman Hotel in Dehi’s Aerocity, an engineer is quietly dismantling a stereotype. It is Brockmann’s first visit to India under Bosch. He walks in a few minutes late, apologises, offers a firm handshake and takes his seat. Dressed in a navy blue jacket and trousers and an open-collared white shirt, he carries little of the theatre that often accompanies global CEOs.

When I ask whether people see him as “fast & furious” or “cool and composed”, he laughs.

“Cool and decisive,” he says.

It sounds almost like a self-portrait. “Am I talking to an engineer who became a CEO,” I ask, “or a CEO whose heart still beats as an engineer?”

“You’re talking to a CEO with a technical background,” he says.

Brockmann studied engineering and added an MBA early in his career. But when I ask what still makes his heart beat, his answer isn’t engineering.

“Products,” he says.

He has spent around 25 years in consumer-driven industries, moving from automobiles to appliances and eventually heating and cooling. They are technical businesses, but his fascination lies where engineering encounters the consumer.

“I’m not the perfect engineer,” he admits.

His strength, he reckons, lies elsewhere: understanding consumer needs, translating them into technical specifications, and confronting the commercial question every piece of engineering eventually has to answer: what will people actually want and pay for?

The fascination began in Hamburg, where Brockmann studied aeronautical engineering partly because Airbus Commercial Aircraft was headquartered there. He watched aircraft land, became fascinated by flying and eventually interned at Airbus.

“I love the product,” he says.

That obsession would follow him from aircraft to automobiles, refrigerators, heating systems, and air conditioners.

THE MAN WHO REFUSED TO STAND STILL

There is another thread running through Brockmann’s career: he doesn’t like leaving a business exactly where he found it.

At Electrolux, after a decade, he began asking whether staying too long had changed the way he saw the business.

“Am I still... am I not blind?” he asked then.

Eight years, he reckons, is a reasonable point for a leader to ask whether familiarity has begun disguising itself as expertise.

Volkswagen had taught him one kind of business. Electrolux another. Bosch offered a third. Yet he saw a familiar architecture: European companies operating globally, multi-brand businesses sharing platforms and backend capabilities while allowing individual brands to retain their identities.

Bosch also offered him a much bigger transformation. Home Comfort had historically been dominated by heating. Brockmann believed that couldn’t remain the story. Europe needed to electrify heating, while globally heating and cooling were converging.

The scale was overwhelmingly on one side. Cooling, Brockmann says, is 15 to 20 times larger than heating. The expertise required to capture that future wouldn’t come only from Europe’s heating specialists. Increasingly, it would sit with Asia’s cooling specialists. That was the strategic logic behind Bosch’s acquisition of Hitachi’s air-conditioning business in 2025: go global, diversify risk, acquire powerful brands, and build scale in Asian HVAC.

And one country sat prominently inside that calculation: India.

THE INDIA BET

Brockmann doesn’t need many words to describe what he wants here.

“We want to win and grow,” he says.

India is already among Bosch Home Comfort’s top eight markets globally. Brockmann wants it among the top three by 2030.

The Hitachi acquisition gives that ambition scale. Completed in August 2025 for €7.4 billion, the largest acquisition in Bosch’s history, it transformed Home Comfort into a more global HVAC player with a substantially larger presence in cooling and Asia Pacific.

India sits at the intersection of those worlds. Brockmann sees an increasingly affluent consumer buying more air conditioners and other durable goods. Yet price remains critical, particularly for first-time buyers making a significant household investment.

“First they have to look for price,” he says.

Then comes trust. During his visit, Brockmann went to retail stores. What he found helped illuminate how differently air conditioners are sold in India and Europe.

In much of Europe, residential heating and cooling systems move through professional channels, with installers influencing what enters a consumer’s home. In India, residential air conditioners are sold through electrical retailers, putting consumers much closer to the decision.

“Here you need to explain more,” he explains.

That means communicating technology, features and specifications to buyers who may be encountering them for the first time.

The acquisition has also brought Hitachi, which Brockmann describes as a “mass premium” brand, alongside Bosch. His plan is a dual-brand strategy, with each occupying its own space. Bosch itself, he believes, needs to become more aggressive in telling its story.

Price remains a part of that story. Indian price points, Brockmann acknowledges, are lower on average than in Europe. Technology can deliver more, but the economics still have to work for the person buying it. That tension takes Brockmann into something bigger than India.

THE MASSES MAKE THE DIFFERENCE

Ask Brockmann about sustainability and he quickly removes the halo from it.

“The masses make the difference,” he points out.

If sustainable products are affordable only for the rich, he argues, their ability to change the world remains limited. Ecological value has to coexist with economic and social value.

At Electrolux, Brockmann was involved in driving what he describes as the first factories in the US using fluoro-free refrigerant and foam. The environmental case was strong, but he points out that the change also made economic sense.

“If only the rich people can afford sustainable products, we don’t make a difference,” he says.

It is the consumer guy inside the engineer again. The technology can be cleaner and more efficient, but someone still has to be able to afford it.

DATA, INSTINCT & THE LAST CALL

Brockmann describes himself as “cool and decisive”, but experience has complicated what deciding means.

When I ask whether he relies more on data or instinct, he initially refuses the binary.

“A balance of both,” he says. I push him to choose. “Data,” he picks.

But why?

“The other can let you make too many errors,” he says. 

There is something delicious about that answer coming from a man who has just explained one of his own errors. Experience hasn’t made Brockmann infallible. What it has changed is his relationship with action. Asked what advice today’s Brockmann would give his younger self, he talks about patience: waiting sometimes and allowing things the chance to change on their own.

For a CEO whose instinct is to decide, learning when not to make a decision may have been the harder lesson. Age has also taught him to delegate. A global CEO cannot make every call, and people expected to take responsibility need the space to exercise it.

But delegation has a limit. Eventually, some decisions travel all the way up an organisation and stop at one desk: His.

I ask whether that makes the CEO’s job lonely. “Yeah, it is,” he admits.

Brockmann can seek views, exchange ideas and challenge his own thinking. But some decisions cannot be outsourced.

At some point, the advice ends. The CEO decides.

THE DECISION

We are nearing the end when I ask Brockmann what he enjoys most about being a CEO. He could choose strategy, products, transformation, building businesses or winning markets. His answer comes back to the thread running quietly through our conversation.

“I love to make decisions. That’s what I love most,” he explains.

There is something almost contradictory about it. Here is a man who has acknowledged one of his biggest recent mistakes. A CEO who admits he followed the crowd during Europe’s heat-pump boom, prefers data but knows it cannot eliminate uncertainty, and has learnt that patience sometimes means allowing events to unfold before acting. Yet the act of deciding remains the part he loves most.

Perhaps that is why the FOMO story reveals so much. When everybody is accelerating, slowing down can feel like failure. When competitors are grabbing market share, accepting that you may temporarily lose some requires a different kind of nerve.

Brockmann knows that because he once chose the accelerator.

“I made the error to go with the flow,” he admits.

There is no grand attempt to turn the mistake into wisdom or claim he will never make another one. That would be an odd promise from somebody whose job is to make consequential decisions with incomplete information.

Outside the hotel, Delhi is still moving.

Inside, Brockmann is preparing to take Bosch deeper into one of the world’s most fiercely contested cooling markets and turn India from a top-eight market into a top-three one. More products. More markets. More decisions. And almost certainly another moment when everybody else seems to be accelerating.

This time, Brockmann knows he doesn’t always have to go with the flow.