CEOs to Fire in 2013

A number of large public company CEOs have come under fire in the past year because of the extremely poor financial results of the public corporations they run. Some, like Meg Whitman of Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), have been at their jobs a relatively short time. Others, like Chesapeake Energy Corp. (NYSE: CHK) co-founder and CEO Aubrey McClendon, have been with their firms for years. But regardless of their tenure, Wall St. gets impatient when financial results and share prices are declining, and these CEOs' jobs may be in jeopardy. No different than in other years, a number of CEOs will lose their positions next year. It is easy to forecast some of the CEOS who will be dismissed, based on the recent results of their stewardship.

Click here to see the eight CEOs to fire in 2013

Of course, CEOs are thrown out for a number of reasons. Stock price and financial performance are at the top of the list, though. Additionally, some chief executives have been unable to reverse long-term declines. This has been the problem for Rory Read at Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (NYSE: AMD). The dying chip company has begun to slip away even more quickly since he joined.

Other CEOs were hired to rapidly turn around a company, and investors often discover they had too high hopes. Either the public corporations they took over are so badly damaged that no one can repair them, or these CEOs were ill-suited for the job. It became evident quickly that Ron Johnson could not repair J.C. Penney Co. Inc. (NYSE: JCP) and Sherilyn McCoy could not fix Avon Products Inc. (NYSE: AVP). In each case, the problems at the companies they took over went from serious to critical.

24/7 Wall St. reviewed the stock performance of S&P 500 companies in 2012 and the past five years. We also reviewed financial performance for 2012 and the past five years, unless a company was taken public more recently. All of the CEOs likely to be fired next year run companies that had huge share price drops.

As a general rule, a CEO had to be in his or her job for two years or more. The exceptions were cases in which a new chief executive made a troubled situation worse through a series of poor decisions that accelerated a sharp decline in the company's fortunes.

These are the CEOs likely to be fired next year.

Filed under: 24/7 Wall St. Wire, Corporate Governance, Management Change, Special Report Tagged: AAPL, AMD, AMZN, AVP, CHK, DELL, EA, featured, GOOG, GRPN, HPQ, IBM, INTC, JCP, ORCL, QCOM, WIN, WMT, ZNGA