Home Business Apple Inc. shuffles its leadership team, Jeff Williams is new COO

Apple Inc. shuffles its leadership team, Jeff Williams is new COO

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) has appointed Jeff Williams as its new Chief Operating Officer, who now becomes the No. 2 man at Apple only after Tim Cook.

In addition, the company also made three other announcements on Thursday, with Phil Schiller to expand his role as senior vice president, while Johny Srouji will be joining Apple’s executive team as senior VP for its hardware technologies.

Apple also confirmed that they’ll be appointing Tor Myhren in Q1 2016, who’ll don the role as Vice President of marketing communications.

“We are fortunate to have incredible depth and breadth of talent across Apple’s executive team. As we come to the end of the year, we’re recognizing the contributions already being made by two key executives,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “Jeff is hands-down the best operations executive I’ve ever worked with, and Johny’s team delivers world-class silicon designs which enable new innovations in our products year after year.”

Often known as “Tim Cook’s Tim Cook”, Williams joined the company back in 1998 and in 2004 was appointed vice president of operations. Earlier, he used to work at IBM and spent three years undertaking engineering and operations roles for the company. According to Apple, he was a key figure in the successful launch of iPhones along with the Apple Watch, which was developed under his supervision.

Meanwhile, Tor Myhren will be replacing Hiroki Asai, who announced his plans for retirement after working for almost 18 years for the company in marketing communications along with graphic design. Myhren has a reputation of being one of the most creative talents in the advertising industry, known for successful campaigns such as Oprah Winfrey’s car giveaway back in 2004. He has previously worked for TBWA\Chiat\Day LA along with Publicis Groupe’s Leo Burnett.

Apple also announced that senior vice president for marketing Phil Schiller will oversee the App Store, which now includes apps for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, along with the Apple Watch and Apple TV. Earlier Apple’s services head Eddy Cue was heading this role. However, his responsibilities have been expanded in recent years with the launch of Apple Pay along with Apple Music. He recently tweeted that Apple Music users will soon be able to upload up to 100,000 songs on their iTunes library.