Kevan Parekh Replaces Luca Maestri
Apple (Slashdot, ArsTechnica, MacRumors):
Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri will transition from his role on January 1, 2025. Maestri will continue to lead the Corporate Services teams, including information systems and technology, information security, and real estate and development, reporting to Apple CEO Tim Cook. As part of a planned succession, Kevan Parekh, Apple’s Vice President of Financial Planning and Analysis, will become Chief Financial Officer and join the executive team.
[…]
Parekh has been at Apple for 11 years and currently leads Financial Planning and Analysis, G&A and Benefits Finance, Investor Relations, and Market Research. Prior to this role, Parekh led Worldwide Sales, Retail, and Marketing Finance. He began his tenure leading the financial support of Apple’s Product Marketing, Internet Sales and Services, and Engineering teams.
So I’ll miss Luca Maestri on the calls. I’ll miss his Italian accent, which used to flummox English language speech-to-text algorithms. In an impressive endorsement of modern AI models, his words are now transcribed with almost no accent-induced errors. I’ll miss his occasional turns of phrase, like when he described the company facing a “cocktail of headwinds.” I’ll miss his occasional enthusiastic response to an analyst picking data out of the company disclosures, as when he practically lit up when Richard Kramer (“Richard! How are the kids?!”) of Arete Research asked him about the most exciting possible topic for a CFO… free cash flow margins.
Companies often struggle with the departure of key executives, but Apple has a time-tested way to deal with it: make sure that the person quitting doesn’t actually leave.
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Maestri will still have a few direct reports, including Timothy Campos (IS&T), Kristina Raspe (real estate) and George Stathakopoulos (information security). Instead of letting Maestri fully retire, he’ll have a less demanding role: being the boss of three groups that already have some of Apple’s strongest leaders and probably don’t need much oversight.
[…]
We’ll likely see similar scenarios play out in the coming years. After all, many top executives are nearing retirement age. In May, I detailed who the likely successors are for this old guard at Apple.
Three of the biggest transitions will involve Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams, services head Eddy Cue and — of course — Cook himself. If Williams doesn’t make a clean exit, he can probably give up the COO title but stay in charge of Apple’s health and design groups. Cue could hold on to the fun part of the business — things like Apple TV+ and sports — but give up the rest of his organization. And Cook will probably become Apple’s executive chairman when he hands off the CEO job to who I believe will be hardware engineering chief John Ternus.
Previously:
Update (2024-09-10): See also: Hacker News.
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That recent blogpost about how weird Apple owners are for caring about shit like this comes to mind.
am I allowed to point at ruthless Indian nepotism as the likely reason for this choice, or is that taboo?
(Google "indian origin kevan parekh" and you'll see I'm very much not the only one who noticed his ethnicity, though those articles are all celebrating it)
