Meat products company Tyson Foods, Inc. (TSN) Thursday announced the selection of Donnie Smith by its Board as president and chief executive officer with immediate effect. Smith takes over the positions from Leland Tollett, who has been serving as interim president and chief executive officer of the company since January.
Smith is currently serving as senior group vice president of Poultry and Prepared Foods business. Tyson Foods also named Jim Lochner, currently senior group vice president of Fresh Meats, as chief operating officer. Tollett will continue to assist Smith and Lochner in the coming months in the transition, and he will be available for strategic advice and support, the company stated.
Tyson Foods also said that successors to Smith and Lochner will be named within the next two weeks, along with any other related announcements.
Commenting on the appointment of Smith, John Tyson, Chairman of the company's Board stated, "I have worked with both Donnie and Jim for a number of years and am convinced that they are the right leadership team for this next phase in the evolution of our company."
The company said that Chief Operating Officer Lochner, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Dennis Leatherby, Executive Vice President and General Counsel David Van Bebber, Executive Vice President and Special Assistant to the President Buddy Wray, Senior Vice President for Human Resources Ken Kimbro and Senior Vice President for External Relations Sara Lilygren will report directly to Smith.
Meanwhile, all of Tyson Foods' business units, including Poultry and Prepared Foods, Fresh Meats, International, Renewable Products, and the Shared Services Groups that support the business units through Transportation, Information Services, Product Development and Environmental, Health and Safety Services will report directly to Lochner.
Smith joined Tyson Foods in 1980 after graduating from the University of Tennessee with a degree in Animal Science. After seven years of experience in various live poultry production jobs, he joined the Tyson commodities purchasing group.
Since then, he has had various leadership roles in the company, including Purchasing; Environmental, Health and Safety; Food Safety and Quality Assurance; Manufacturing Services; Information Systems; and Logistics. After that, he became senior group vice president of Poultry and Prepared Foods.
Lochner joined IBP, inc., which was later purchased by Tyson, in 1983 as director of research. Before that, he was a quality control food technologist at Oscar Mayer Foods and a laboratory technician at the University of Wisconsin.
In his first 14 years at IBP, Lochner held several different officer positions in various quality control and technical services areas. He became executive vice president of IBP in 1997, responsible for all of IBP's beef and pork plants. In 2000, he was promoted to president and chief executive officer of IBP.
Following Tyson Foods' acquisition of IBP in 2001, Lochner was named group vice president of Tyson Fresh Meats. In 2005, he was named Tyson Foods' senior group vice president of Margin Optimization and he became senior group vice president of Fresh Meats in 2007.
Tyson Foods is slated to announce its fourth-quarter results on November 23. On average, analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expect the company to earn $0.26 per share on revenues of $6.89 billion. Analysts' forecast typically excludes one-time items.
TSN is trading at $13.03, down $0.06, on a volume of 880,464 shares.
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