Costco announced yesterday that its Chief Financial Officer Richard Galanti was stepping down after nearly four decades in the role.
He will be succeeded by Gary Millerchip in mid-March but will remain with the warehouse club operator until January 2025 in an advisory role.
Millerchip has served as Senior VP and Chief Financial Officer at Kroger since April 2019. He has spent 15 years at the US supermarket giant having previously spent more than 20 years in banking, including with the NatWest Group in the UK.
Analysts said Millerchip’s departure from Kroger’s was untimely given the grocer’s pending merger with smaller rival Albertsons.
Costco also got a new CEO, Ron Vachris, at the start of the year after Craig Jelinek announced in October that he would step down from the role at the end of 2023.
Commenting on Galanti’s departure, Vachris commented: “Over his nearly forty-year tenure as chief financial officer at the company, Richard has made innumerable and invaluable contributions to its success. He is widely known, admired, and respected among our shareholders, employees, business partners, and others. We express our deepest gratitude for his long and loyal service.”
Costco’s 874 warehouses around the world have performed well in recent years, with a significant boost in sales during the pandemic, whilst appealing to middle-to-upper-income consumers during the cost of living crisis.
