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- Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier said Thursday he’s stepping down to serve on the board as executive chairman.
- He’ll be replaced by Merck’s chief financial officer, Robert Davis, who joined the firm in 2014.
- Frazier, 66, is one of only four Black CEOs on the Fortune 500.
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Merck & Co said on Thursday that Kenneth Frazier, one of only a handful of Black CEOs leading major US companies, would step down as chief executive officer at the end of June, to be replaced by Chief Financial Officer Robert Davis.
Frazier, 66, will continue to serve on US pharma giant Merck’s board as executive chairman for a transition period to be determined by the board, the company said. Merck’s stock price has doubled since he took the helm in 2011.
Frazier has been at the company nearly 30 years. He is currently one of only four Black CEOs of a Fortune 500 company – Roz Brewer will become the fifth when she leaves Starbucks to head up the Walgreens Boots Alliance in March.
Frazier made headlines in 2017 when he became the first business leader to leave US President Donald Trump’s now disbanded manufacturing council following Trump’s comments on a white nationalist rally held in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Under Frazier’s watch, cancer drug Keytruda has raked in blockbuster sales for Merck, becoming one of the leading products in a new generation of oncology treatments.
The grandson of a sharecropper, and son of a janitor, Frazier was set to retire in 2019, but the company scrapped a policy requiring CEOs to retire at the age of 65.
His replacement, Davis, is a career pharmaceutical industry executive who joined Merck as CFO in 2014 and took on added responsibilities in 2016 to include the company's global support functions.
The company also forecast 2021 adjusted profit of $6.48 and $6.68 per share, beating estimates of $6.41 per share, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.