Dave Peacock steps down as President of Anheuser-Busch
Emotions were flying high in the blogosphere when on 24 January 2012 the St Louis Today newspaper reported that Anheuser-Busch President Dave Peacock had resigned and would be replaced by Luiz Edmond, the Brazilian-born North America Zone President of AB-InBev.
Calling him the leader of the "Judas Squad" that put thousands of St Louis employees on the street and out of work, bloggers cheered his departure with lots of non-printable expletives.
The reason he made bloggers’ pulses quicken is that Mr Peacock, 43, was one of the few remaining A-B executives who managed to jump ship to the Brazilians after the St Louis based brewer was acquired in 2008 by InBev, creating the global parent AB-Busch InBev.
Mr Edmond will keep his position as Zone President while taking on oversight of the U.S. operation. Mr Peacock will continue to serve in an advisory role.
Mr Peacock, a second generation A-B employee who began working for A-B in 1992, was promoted to President in 2008 in the wake of the acquisition after serving as Vice President Marketing since late 2007. While many U.S. executives departed after the takeover, Mr Peacock was allowed to stay on board by the new owners to lead the critical U.S. operation.
His departure more than three years later means that the takeover is complete.
The St Louis newspapers also reported that upon leaving, Mr Peacock appears to have walked away from stock options that would today be worth roughly USD 28 million. The arrangement required that he stay five years after the merger and that the company meet financial targets.
In an interview Mr Peacock reportedly said that he didn’t really mind leaving that money on the table. “It was just the right time for me,” Mr Peacock said.
Several bloggers disagreed with this version of events. They insinuated that Mr Peacock didn’t leave this pot of gold on the table at all. Instead they hinted that the company wasn’t going to meet the financial goals necessary to trigger his stock options and he knew it. If he wasn’t going to be able to exercise his options in two years there was no reason to stick around.
A mutually agreeable exit payment had probably been negotiated before.
All has not been well at Anheuser-Busch for quite some time. Volumes have been declining and last year Budweiser lost its second rank among the U.S. best-selling beers to Coors Light. This is the first time in almost 20 years that A-B didn’t occupy the top two ranks with Bud and Budweiser.
