Profile of Luca Maestri, Apple’s Chief Financial Officer

We continue to deepen our “Who’s Who at Apple” special on the profiles of the company’s top executives. And this time it’s the turn of Luca Maestri , one of the most recent additions to the team of senior vice presidents of the block with a long career behind him in companies like General Motors, Nokia Siemens Networks and Xerox.

Maestri succeeded Peter Oppenheimer last year as Chief Financial Officer of Apple and after just eight months in office, he was already the most admired CFO in the world by his fellow Fortune 500 professionals. He alone, in the history of the business world, can boast of sitting on a mountain of over $200 billion in cash, protecting it and making sure it keeps growing while finding good use for it.

Profile of Luca Maestri, CFO

Full name : Luca Maestri. Current position : CFO, financial director. Year of birth : 1963 (51 years old). Higher education : Degree in Economics from Luiss University in Rome and Master of Science in Management from Boston University. Date of joining Apple : 2013. Member of the executive team : since 29 May 2014.

Career

At the age of 25, Maestri began his professional career at General Motors , one of the world’s leading automotive production groups. There he spent 20 years climbing through different financial positions in countries such as Brazil, Ireland, Italy, Singapore and Thailand helping the company establish its regional operations in the Asia-Pacific markets.

In March 2007 he became the CFO and Vice President of General Motors in Europe, responsible for nearly two years of the company’s operations in more than 45 countries with an annual net income of approximately $40 billion.

During the period that Maestri was in the company, GM remained the world’s leading car manufacturer, but perhaps by sheer luck or perhaps some intuition, it anticipated the 2009 economic crisis that would lead to the giant’s bankruptcy and restructuring, jumping to Nokia Siemens Networks in September 2008.

There he remained for two years also as CFO until February 2011 when he joined Xerox to hold the same position for another two years. It was then, in March 2013, that he was hired by Apple as Vice President of Finance, working closely with the company’s management team since his arrival.

Just one year later, Apple announced that Maestri would take over from Oppenheimer as Apple’s CFO , who was retiring after 25 years with a transition period starting in June 2014.

A promising start at Apple

Especial Quién es quien en Apple

As the block’s financial director, Maestri assumes responsibility for overseeing the accounting, treasury, investor relations, tax, information systems and internal audit, facilities, business development and human resource functions. And like the other senior vice presidents, he reports directly to Apple CEO Tim Cook, serving on the company’s executive committee.

Before taking office, Cook said: “his contributions to Apple have already been significant in the time he has been with us and he has quickly earned the respect of his colleagues in the company” .

But Maestri receives more than just respect in return, namely a annual salary of $1 million to which must be added a bonus in the form of a block of shares worth $15 million; an important incentive to keep him in the company that is released in blocks every six months (until May 2018) as long as the following condition is met: continue working for the apple. As you see, nothing is left to chance in these matters.

At this point, you may be wondering how important the position of Maestri really is, so you may want to take a look at the results of a study conducted with executives from major U.S. companies who agreed in 94% of the cases that the CFO is one of the most important positions in a company of this magnitude today.

His responsibilities also include planning future mergers and acquisitions of the apple

Luca Maestri will become a very familiar face to shareholders during the financial results announcements, but more interestingly, his responsibilities also include planning future mergers and acquisitions of the apple, something particularly fun when you have enough cash to buy Disney (with Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars, and many other “toys” inside as extras) for 160. billion, Amazon and Netflix for 142.7 and 27.1 billion respectively, IBM for 152 billion, or Tesla for a measly 25 billion.

Considering that Apple’s biggest acquisition to date has been Beats Electronics for 3 billion last year, it’s not like we think it’s going to happen anytime soon, but hey, maybe Maestri will come to us one morning looking for his name in Google and like the idea, don’t you think?

At Apple