Ginni Rometty has announced that she will be retiring as chief executive officer (CEO) of information technology giant IBM in April.
IBM CEO Ginni Rometty will be stepping down from her position in April after leading the tech firm since 2012. She will be replaced by Arvind Krishna, who currently serves as senior vice president for cloud and cognitive software.
Red hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, who was expected to succeed Rometty, will become the company's president. Both executive changes will take effect on April 6.
Rometty will remain as executive chairman of IBM until her retirement at the end of the year. IBM shares went up by 5% following the announcement.
Rometty, who is 62 years old, was widely expected to retire soon since previous IBM CEOs had stepped down around the age of 60. Her replacements, Krishna and Whitehurst are 57 and 52 years old, respectively.
Her departure from IBM is perceived to further deplete the number of women CEOs running large companies. Including Rometty, there were only 33 women CEOs in charge of Fortune 500 firms as of 2019.
Other prominent female CEOs include GM's Mary Barra, Best Buy's Corie Barry, Lockheed Martin's Marillyn Hewson and Safra Catz of Oracle.
Tim Hubbard, an assistant professor of management at the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business and a former IBM consultant, said: "Ginni Rometty's exit from IBM marks the departure of one of the most prestigious female CEOs of the past decade. Even though IBM's stock performance was more volatile than desired by Wall Street, she left a lasting mark on one of the cornerstone American companies."
Under Rometty's leadership, IBM propelled its presence in the field of cloud computing, particularly with its landmark acquisition of Red Hat for $34 billion in 2018.
While many thought Whitehurst would be Rometty's successor following the Red Hat purchase, Krishna also has expertise in the cloud and is an IBM veteran, working for the company for nearly 30 years in a variety of roles.
