Electrolux said Chief Executive Officer Keith McLoughlin has decided to retire following the collapse last month of the Swedish manufacturer’s £2.2 billion deal to buy General Electric’s household goods business.
He will be replaced by Jonas Samuelson, who heads large appliance operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The new CEO’s “focus will be to continue executing the Electrolux strategy of becoming a truly consumer driven company leveraging our global scale,” Chairman Ronnie Leten said in a statement.
Electrolux pursued the GE deal to gain scale in the U.S. market and had decided to go to court to fight the U.S. Justice Department’s claims that the combined company and rival Whirlpool would be overly dominant in the U.S. cooking-appliance area. The deal was first announced in September 2014 and a trial was under way in Washington when the two companies announced on December 7th they were abandoning the plan.
Samuelson, who joined Electrolux in 2008, has also held the roles of head of global operations and group chief financial officer, according to the statement. McLoughlin, who plans to return to live in the U.S. “will continue to support Electrolux in the North American market on a consultancy basis.”
After the collapse of the GE deal, Electrolux unveiled a plan to cut costs and jobs at its small-appliance unit, which it said was unrelated. The manufacturer paid GE a breakup fee of $175 million (£120 million), and said the transaction and integration costs from the failed deal would be about 175 million kronor (£14.14 million) in the fourth quarter while expenses related to a bridge loan would be 225 million kronor.
