Tim Cook will step down as Apple CEO

Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive officer (CEO), said Monday that he would step down after nearly 15 years running an operation that rode the wild popularity of the iPhone to become one of the most influential and valuable companies in the world.

Cook, 65, will move into a new role as Apple’s executive chair in September and be succeeded in the company’s corner office by John Ternus, the 50-year-old head of Apple’s hardware engineering.

The retirement of Cook will end one of the most successful management runs in the history of US business. During his tenure, Apple’s annual profit quadrupled to more than UScopy10 billion, while its value ballooned more than tenfold to $4 trillion.

Cook replaced Apple co-founder Steve Jobs shortly before Jobs’ death from complications from a metastatic pancreatic neuroendocrine tumour (a rare form of pancreatic cancer) in 2011, having earned a reputation for perfecting the nuts and bolts of a global consumer electronics business. Apple has since defined how a modern technology company operates, with products assembled in a supply chain that stretches from the giant operations that Cook helped create in China to India and Brazil and a popular retail business that operates on five continents.

“He stepped into the world’s biggest shoes — the biggest shoes that anybody on the planet has ever had to step into — and he’s done an amazing job,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s chief financial officer (CFO) from 2004 to 2014.