CFO Liddell Steps Down

Chris Liddell has stepped down as Microsoft’s chief financial officer (CFO) after more than four years and has been replaced by Peter Klein, the CFO of the Microsoft Business Division. The change is effective immediately, and Liddell will leave Microsoft at the end of 2009 to become the CFO of General Motors.

Liddell joined the company as CFO in May 2005, replacing John Connors, who retired in Mar. 2005 after about five years in the job. At Microsoft, Liddell helped lead a major cost-containment effort in early 2009, as the company responded to plummeting revenues and a dramatic global recession. This effort, which included the first-ever net headcount reduction in company history, helped Microsoft reduced its expenses for fiscal year 2009 (which ended June 30, 2009) by about US$3 billion compared with its estimates and probably contributed to an increase in the company’s share price during calendar year 2009—when Microsoft announced Liddell’s retirement on Nov. 24, its share price had almost doubled from its low in Mar. 2009, outpacing the rate of growth of the S&P 500 and NASDAQ indexes. Liddell also served as CFO during Microsoft’s largest-ever acquisition, the US$6 billion purchase of online advertising company aQuantive in 2007, as well as the proposed (and eventually abandoned) acquisition of Yahoo, which could have cost the company more than US$40 billion. Before Microsoft, Liddell spent two years as CFO of forestry products company International Paper; prior to that, he served as CEO and CFO of Carter Holt Harvey, a New Zealand forestry company.