Don Davis Named Rockwell President : Industry: The appointment from the commercial side of the business signals the company’s new focus on its non-defense and aerospace sectors.
Rockwell International Corp., underlining its evolution from an aerospace and defense concern into one increasingly focused on commercial programs, Monday named the head of its factory-automation group as president and chief operating officer.
In choosing Don H. Davis, 55, an executive vice president who also oversees Rockwell’s automotive-parts lines, Seal Beach-based Rockwell bypassed its other executive vice president, Kent M. Black, who heads the company’s space and defense-electronics groups.
Black, also 55, promptly announced plans to retire in early 1996.
Davis, who was also named a director, is now the heir-apparent to Rockwell Chairman Donald R. Beall, but Beall is only 56 and unlikely to retire any time soon. The president’s job at Rockwell had been vacant since 1988 when Beall, who then held the post, was elected chairman and chief executive.
Inquiries to Davis and Black were referred to Beall, who said in a telephone interview that Black “for a number of years planned to retire early,” and “I’m sure this decision has been a catalyst for him reaching a final decision on the matter.”
Beall declined to say why Davis was chosen over other candidates, but said Davis has “great international experience” and is “comfortable in a high-technology environment.”
Rockwell, in “making a change” from choosing top officers with aerospace and defense backgrounds and tapping Davis instead, “is very definitely making a deliberate move” to increase the emphasis on its growing industrial-automation and other commercial lines, said Paul Nisbet, an analyst at the consulting firm JSA Research in Newport, R.I.
But Beall said Davis’ selection does not signal a Rockwell retreat from its remaining defense-electronics and aerospace businesses, which still generate about $4 billion of Rockwell’s $11 billion in annual revenue. (Beall is also a director of Times Mirror Co., publisher of The Times.)
Davis spent most of his career at Allen-Bradley Co., an industrial-automation specialist that Rockwell acquired in 1985. He was named an executive vice president of Rockwell in 1994.
