Horses Race for Coke CEO Job

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jul 31, 8:20AM EDT · Published Jul 31, 7:03AM EDT

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A headline on the home page of Coke.com reads “Battle for Everything.” It is a promotion for a film that failed at the box office — “Battleship.” It could describe the match the Coca-Cola Co. (NYSE: KO) has set to decide who will be its new chief executive. At least that is what outside analysts guess. Hidden deep inside the Coke site, beyond the promotions for the Olympics, is a press release that says:

Ahmet Bozer, currently President of the Eurasia & Africa Group, will be appointed President of Coca-Cola International. Steve Cahillane, currently President and Chief Executive Officer of Coca-Cola Refreshments (CCR), will be appointed President of Coca-Cola Americas.

One of these people will become the CEO of Coca-Cola Co. when Muhtar Kent, who is 57, retires. That may be several years off — probably sometime around the 2020 Olympics.

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.