PPG Names Kovalsky and Talman Vice Presidents of Coatings Units

28 June 2000

PPG Names Kovalsky and Talman Vice Presidents of Coatings Units

    PITTSBURGH - Dennis Kovalsky has been named Glendale, Calif.-based vice president of aerospace coatings and sealants at PPG Industries. Also, Marc Talman was named PPG's vice president of packaging coatings, based in London.

    Also in the packaging coatings unit, Gregory Hayes, 38, European director of sales and marketing in London, became general manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. John L. Liebenguth, 43, director of sales and marketing, Asia-Pacific, remains in Pittsburgh as general manager, Americas and Asia-Pacific.

    Kovalsky, 49, general manager of aerospace coatings and sealants since last October, joined PPG in 1977 as an engineer at the Circleville, Ohio, resins plant. He was production superintendent there and at the Delaware, Ohio, coatings plant before moving in 1987 to Paris as international coatings operations coordinator. He was later manager of PPG Industries Lacke's Wuppertal, Germany, plant.

    He returned to the U.S. in 1991 as Cleveland coatings plant manager, was named director of pretreatments, based in Troy, Mich., in 1994, and became global pretreatment and specialty products director in 1998.

    Kovalsky, a native of Monessen, Pa., is a 1973 biochemistry graduate of Washington & Jefferson College.

    Talman, 46, had been European packaging coatings general manager since PPG expanded its business unit in January 1999 by acquiring Courtaulds packaging coatings. He was managing director of the Courtaulds coatings unit from 1996 after being director for Europe from 1993. He was production manager at a French Corning Inc. plant before joining Courtaulds in 1981.

    A native of Lille, France, he is a mechanical engineering graduate of Ecole Centrale de Lille and has master's degrees in economics and business administration from Institute Europeen D'Administration des Enterprises (INSEAD).

    PPG is the world's leading maker of transportation coatings, and a major global supplier of packaging and industrial coatings, glass, fiber glass and chemicals. It has about 120 manufacturing locations in 23 countries, and had sales in 1999 of US$7.8 billion.