Alfred W. Langer was born in 1950 in Dusseldorf, Germany. In 1979, he earned a MBA specializing in finance, organization and acquisition valuation.

In 1980, he moved to Houston to work as a controller in the marketing department of Texas Instruments’ peripherals division. In 1981, he joined Hoechst AG in Frankfurt in the corporate auditing department. In 1985, he took a managerial position coordinating all the commercial activities of Hoechst in North America. In 1988, after assisting with the initial integration of Celanese and Hoechst, he joined Hoechst Holland in Amsterdam and until 1994 served as one of three members of the board of management, responsible for the sales divisions. In October 1994, Langer became managing director of Hoechst Trevira GmbH & Co. KG, the European fiber division of Hoechst in Frankfurt. In July 1997, after the sale of the division was completed he was appointed Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Celanese, the chemicals division of Hoechst. Following the spin-off of Celenase and the engineering polymers division of Hoechst, he was named Corporate Treasurer of the new combined German Celanese corporation. In 2001, he left Celanese to become CFO of Solvadis, a subsidiary of the German group MG Technologies.

He is currently an independent consultant in financial and organizational areas.