WeWork Taps Former Oil Industry Exec As CFO
WeWork, which has been rebuilding its roster of executives in the wake of its canceled IPO, has named energy industry executive Kimberly Ross as chief financial officer.
The executive addition comes only weeks after WeWork tapped a former EY executive, Shyam Gidumal, to be its chief operating officer, as well as hiring a new chief communications officer and a chief product officer.
On Feb. 1, WeWork named Sandeep Mathrani its new CEO to succeed co-CEOs Artie Minson and Sebastian Gunningham, who temporarily took the company's reins after founder Adam Neumann resigned late last year. Mathrani led the turnaround of General Growth Properties.
Most recently, Ross worked as CFO of Baker Hughes, an oil field services company that merged with GE Oil and Gas in 2017 and was later spun off as an independent entity. She was also CFO of Avon Products and Koninklijke Ahold, which is now Ahold Delhaize. Ross currently sits on the board of directors for PQ Corp., Chubb Insurance Group and Nestlé S.A.
The addition of new C-suite talent at WeWork is only part of the company's reorganization after major investor SoftBank bailed it out last year. WeWork is also shedding non-core assets that it acquired during the tenure of former CEO Adam Neumann.
WeWork is probably going to sell Managed by Q soon to Eden Technologies, Bloomberg reports, citing anonymous sources, though it will take a loss on the deal. In 2019, WeWork paid $220M for the company, which provides workplace management tech. The sale price to Eden is reportedly $55M.
WeWork is operating under a five-year strategic plan it released in November, which focuses on its core workspace business. That includes maintaining long-term leases in major markets while pursuing other approaches in other markets, such as revenue-sharing joint ventures, franchising and management agreements, a WeWork spokesperson told Bisnow.
Two of the goals of WeWork's five-year plan are to achieve profitability by 2021 and positive cash flow by 2022, something that has eluded the company as it has grown. Currently, WeWork has 740 coworking locations in 170 cities worldwide.
