Boeing appoints two new C-suite executives

Airline manufacturer Boeing appointed B. Marc Allen as Chief Strategy Officer and named Chris Raymond as the company's first Chief Sustainability Officer, both effective October 1st. Yahoo Finance’s Alexis Keenen joins The First Trade with Alexis Christoforous and Brian Sozzi to discuss.

Video Transcript

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Switching gears now, change-ups in the C-suite at Boeing. The airline manufacturer appointed Mark Allen as Chief Strategy Officer and has named Chris Raymond as the company's first Chief Sustainability Officer, both effective October 1. Yahoo Finance's Alexis Keenan joins us for more. So Alexis, shares of Boeing down nearly 55% in two years. What is the hope that these two gentlemen in these roles are going to help fix that?

ALEXIS KEENAN: Big jobs in front of them, Alexis. So both Mark Allen, as well as Chris Raymond, they're Boeing veterans. And they were both part of a Boeing team that worked on that aborted $4.2 billion takeover of Brazilian jet manufacturer Embraer back in April. That was for its commercial division.

Now in this chief strategy position, Boeing says that Mark Allen will be responsible for Boeing's long-term planning, global business and corporate development, as well as strategic investments, acquisitions, and divestitures. As for Chris Raymond, he'll be taking on Boeing's first ever chief sustainability role, and he'll be overseeing environmental, social, and governance priorities, the company says, across their commercial, defense, and services divisions. And Boeing said that this new role was really created to further advance the company's approach to sustainability.

However, what's really interesting is on the company's website-- and this was not included in the press release announcing these two positions-- Boeing said in addition to this sustainability role, that Boeing had asked-- their leadership asked Raymond to lead enterprise-wide efforts in strengthening stakeholder confidence and reinforcing the company's brand following the tragic accidents involving the 737 Max airplane.

So the goal there, they say, is to develop plans for key stakeholder groups along those lines. And that includes employees, airlines, passengers, suppliers, and other partners. So that sounds like quite a big job, Alexis, that little piece there that was included on the website, not necessarily stated in the press release. And it'll be really interesting to see what those plans look like going forward. There's a lot of work to do there.