CEO departures at U.S. companies hit a record this year

Retired, ousted or poached, CEOs headed for the exits this year.

U.S. public companies announced 327 chief executive changes this year through November, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

That’s more than in any other year since at least 2010, when the firm first started tracking the turnover. It’s also an 8.6% increase from last year.

Turnover included CEOs at U.S. companies that have long dominated their industries — like Boeing, Nike and Starbucks. The pace of change points to those companies’ customers, investors, hedge funds or boards growing impatient with sales slumps or strategic missteps in an otherwise strong economy when consumers proved they were willing to spend.

CEO changes slowed during the pandemic, when companies were suddenly faced with lockdowns, remote work, supply chain difficulties and shortages, if not outright survival. They later faced higher borrowing costs, inflation, labor shortages, shifting consumer preferences and other challenges.

Over the past 14 years, 2021 had the lowest number of replacements at 197.

“The cost of capital, the speed of transformation, is creating faster turnover,” said Clarke Murphy, managing director and former chief executive of Russell Reynolds Associates, a leadership advisory firm.

Murphy said it was easier to stand out for poor performance in an otherwise strong market.

“In years of 20-plus-percent S&P [500] returns two years in a row, any company that’s significantly underperforming, the spotlight has been on, and boards of directors moved faster than they might have moved five or seven years ago,” Murphy said.

Consumer-focused companies, which are more susceptible to changing tastes and trends, generally have higher turnover than industries like oil and gas or utilities, which tend to have internal and longer-tenured CEOs.

The recent spike in turnover comes even as the number of public companies has dropped.

Here are some of the major U.S. CEO changes so far this year:

The semiconductor company ousted CEO Pat Gelsinger earlier this month, nearly four years after he was appointed to turn the chipmaker around and better compete with rivals.

Intel‘s stock price and market share had collapsed as the artificial intelligence wave boosted chipmaker Nvidia while Intel struggled to crack into the business.

A successor hasn’t yet been named.

The aerospace giant announced former CEO Dave Calhoun’s departure in March, part of a broad executive shake-up. It came nearly three months after an unsecured door plug blew off midair from a nearly new Boeing 737 Max 9 operated by Alaska Airlines, plunging the company back into a safety crisis after years of problems across its defense and commercial aerospace business,…