The newspaper says that Apple is working to accelerate Tim Cook’s succession plan

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Multiple sources told the newspaper on condition of anonymity that the board of directors and senior executives have recently intensified succession preparations. Apple did not comment on this matter.

John Ternos, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, is seen as Cook’s most likely successor, according to sources cited by the Financial Times, but no decision has been made yet.

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Succession planning has been underway for years, and according to sources close to Apple cited by the Financial Times, accelerating the process will have nothing to do with the company’s recent results.

In the third quarter, Apple recorded revenues of US$102.5 billion in the third quarter, an increase of 8% over the same period in 2024. After the launch of the iPhone 17, in September – Brazil was included for the first time in the first wave of countries to receive the new version of the smartphone – good sales are expected at the end of the year holidays.

Since Cook took over Apple, the company’s market value has jumped from about US$350 billion to about US$4 trillion, in a context where the progress of social networking and information technology has boosted the stock prices of major technology companies.

At the same time, Apple is frequently mentioned in the group of companies that will lag behind in the technological race of artificial intelligence (AI), which has accelerated since the launch of ChatGPT, at the end of 2022, giving great importance to the region. Therefore, the company has faced pressure to reformulate its corporate strategy and increase its focus on artificial intelligence.

One pressure is for Apple to choose to make a major acquisition of a company that is ahead of the curve in this technology race — which would mean breaking with the company’s tradition of developing its own technologies internally.

Two weeks ago, Bloomberg News revealed that Apple was close to a deal to pay about $1 billion a year for a super-powerful artificial intelligence model developed by Alphabet, Google’s parent company. The goal will be to contribute to the reformulation of the voice assistant Siri, according to sources who requested anonymity.

In a report on Saturday, the Financial Times noted that Apple has already made recent changes at the top — Luca Maestri, its CFO and close confidant of Cook, has left his post, and COO Jeff Williams announced he will do the same — and stressed that the final selection of Ternus will once again put a hardware executive in charge, at a time when entering new product categories could help overcome the challenge posed by artificial intelligence.