Brown-Forman has announced its president and CEO Lawson Whiting is planning to retire from the US spirits giant.
In a statement, the owner of the Jack Daniel’s and Woodford Reserve brands said Whiting will leave his position once a successor has been chosen.
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The company’s board has started a search process for a new CEO, with external and internal candidates being considered for the role.
Once a new CEO is found, Whiting will continue to support the business in an advisory role “for a period of time”, the group said.
Brown-Forman chairman Marshall Farrer said Whiting has led the group “through an era of macro challenges and change”.
With Whiting at the helm, “Jack Daniel’s extended its presence into new international markets and categories, Woodford Reserve grew into the world’s leading super-premium American whiskey, and our founding brand, Old Forester, tripled in volume and increased net sales six-fold over the last decade,” Farrer added.
Whiting has worked at Brown-Forman for close to 30 years. He joined the company in 1997 in corporate development and later held positions across investor relations, finance, brand strategy and regional leadership.
Whiting subsequently worked as chief brands and strategy officer and chief operating officer before becoming president and CEO of the business in 2019.
“It has been the privilege of a lifetime to lead Brown-Forman,” Whiting said. ”I have every confidence that the succession process will surface the right leader for Brown-Forman’s next generation of growth, and I look forward to supporting a seamless handoff that ensures our momentum never wavers.”
Alongside the announcement of Whiting’s planned retirement, Brown-Forman restated its outlook for its 2027 fiscal year, first issued on 4 June.
Brown-Forman’s guidance expects net sales to be “approximately flat” along with a 3-5% fall in organic operating income.
In a statement issued with the annual results, the company said it expected “the operating environment for fiscal 2027 [will] remain challenging”.
For the year ended 30 April, Brown-Forman reported net sales of $3.9bn, down 1% year on year.
In a note to clients yesterday (13 July), Barclays analyst Lauren Lieberman said: “We’ll be curious to see whether the new CEO appointment will follow a similar trend as we’ve seen with several other alcohol executive replacements recently named in which the appointees’ most recent experience was from outside the industry.”
As an example, she referred to Brown-Forman’s recently appointed CFO Jim Peters, who joined the business from the domestic appliances company Whirlpool.
Lieberman added: “We also can’t help but wonder how this latest news could ultimately renew investor questions as to the type of strategic change that could come for Brown-Forman. Said differently, deal-related inbound from investors on Brown-Forman has died down but we’d expect investors will closely watch the type of expertise honed in on in Mr Whiting’s replacement. We’d think this news could also lend itself to theories that merger talks with Pernod Ricard were in part a means of succession planning as well.”
Earlier this year, Pernod and Brown-Forman confirmed they were in discussions over a potential deal to form a “partnership akin to a merger of equals”.
However in April, the talks between the two companies over a possible transaction ended without agreement.
