General Motors Co has hired Chris Liddell, the chief financial officer of Microsoft Corp, as its new finance chief, filling a key position with the automaker's highest-profile hire since its July bankruptcy.
The move, announced Monday, brings another well-known industry outsider to GM's shifting senior leadership team at a time when the automaker has been struggling to close deals to sell key assets and regain sales momentum in the U.S. market.
GM has been operating since July with a new board vetted by the Obama administration and, since the start of December, under a new chief executive in Ed Whitacre, who had spent a career at telecommunications provider AT&T.
Over the past three weeks, Whitacre has shaken up GM's top management ranks by promoting two executives, reassigning two others, and bringing in GM director Steve Girsky as an adviser to management.
As CFO, Liddell will face the challenge of readying the automaker for a stock offering to reduce the U.S. government's 60 percent stake in the company, and winning back investor trust after accounting missteps, mounting losses, a costly bankruptcy and $50 billion in government aid.
"Being CFO at Microsoft will seem like a breeze compared to what he has to do at GM," said Toan Tran, a Morningstar analyst who has followed Microsoft for several years.
"It's hard to be a bad CFO at Microsoft. You don't have to deal with much when the company generates a billon dollars (in profit) a month."
"GM will be a much bigger challenge," said Tran.
Liddell, 51, will start at GM in January, the automaker said. He previously announced he would be leaving Microsoft at the end of December, indicating he was looking for a bigger job at another company.
Liddell, a New Zealand native, joined Microsoft in 2005 from International Paper Co, where he was also CFO.
At Microsoft, Liddell was a key player in a range of initiatives that reflected the company's transition to a slower growth business.
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