Bye, Luca (sort of)
Almost nobody who follows Apple for its products (rather than its stock performance) will care, but the company announced on Monday that longtime CFO Luca Maestri is ascending to godhood, er, leaving his job as CFO to become something different:
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.
I know what you’re thinking: One bean counter out, another one in. But I have spent many hours making charts and proofing transcripts of Apple’s financial performance. It’s created a very strange parasocial relationship between me and the people on that quarterly call. If I somehow ran into one of the many analysts who populate the call out on the street one day, I’d get unreasonably excited. (“Katy Huberty, what have you been up to lately?”)
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.
I hope Maestri takes advantage of his new retire-promotion to spend at least a little time cheering on his favorite Serie A soccer squad. A little birdie tells me he’s a big fan.
And welcome, Kevan Parekh. You will be judged by everyone else in the world based on how you handle Apple’s finances and deal with major issues. As for me, I’ll be watching how well the transcription algorithm handles your voice and hoping that you can occasionally embrace your CFO nerdiness or coin a quotable phrase. Remember, always disclaim your forward-looking statements, make sure Tim identifies himself by name, and don’t let any analyst trick you into revealing Apple’s next big product launch.