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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Apple chief financial officer Luca Maestri will step down from the role at the beginning of next year, ending a more than decade-long stint as the iPhone-maker’s top finance executive.

Maestri will be succeeded by Kevan Parekh, Apple’s vice-president for financial planning and analysis, the company said on Monday.

Maestri is a core member of Apple’s close-knit top leadership team and a close confidante of chief executive Tim Cook. He will stay at the company to lead its corporate services teams. 

He has been a familiar face to investors, participating alongside Cook on the company’s quarterly earnings calls. Maestri joined Apple from Xerox in 2013, and previously worked at Nokia Siemens Networks.

On Monday Cook praised Maestri for being “an extraordinary partner in managing Apple for the long term”, pointing to the company’s financial performance during his tenure. 

During Maestri’s tenure Apple has grown in to one of the world’s most valuable companies. Its share price increased from about $20 at the start of 2014 to about $227 today, with its market cap eclipsing $3tn.

The company has also accumulated billions of dollars in cash on hand, despite Maestri announcing the goal of making Apple “net-cash neutral” in 2018. Apple launched a fresh $110bn share buyback in June.

Maestri said in a statement that it had been “the greatest privilege of my professional life” to serve as CFO at the company, adding that he has “enormous confidence in Kevan as he prepares to take the reins”.

Parekh has also been at Apple for more than a decade, working closely with Maestri in Apple’s finance team.

“From our perspective, Apple filling the role with an internal candidate should make the transition a bit smoother, particularly given Mr Parekh’s experience at the company,” Piper Sandler analyst Matt Farrell said in a note on Monday. “However, any change of this magnitude does create some level of uncertainty, especially given the consistency and the history of execution from Mr. Maestri.”

Maestri’s scheduled departure coincides with another recent shake-up in Apple’s management, with one of its top App Store executives, Matt Fischer, announcing his departure last week.

Apple is gearing up to launch its latest smartphone, the iPhone 16, in September, with the company heading into a new era of devices powered by generative AI features.

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

American tech group IBM is closing down the majority of its research and development efforts in China, becoming the latest US company to pull back from the world’s second-largest economy amid increasing tensions between Washington and Beijing.

Employees said more than 1,000 staff were losing their jobs, spread between several offices in mainland cities and working in two research-focused units — China Development Lab and China Systems Lab.

IBM’s move to shed R&D staff comes as a broader retrenchment by American companies takes place in China. In May, Microsoft offered to relocate hundreds of Chinese staff working on cloud and artificial intelligence as the US continued to restrict China’s access to sensitive technologies. Microsoft had earlier closed its LinkedIn social networking site in the country.

Jack Hergenrother, an IBM executive, cited tougher competition when he informed staff of the cuts in a virtual meeting on Monday. He said its China infrastructure business was shrinking and the group was shifting R&D work closer to customers outside the country, according to Chinese media outlet Jiemian, which first reported the news.

IBM’s local business faces Chinese rivals benefiting from top-down Beijing directives to local governments and state-owned groups to buy more tech products from domestic providers.

“In recent years, IBM has been continuously reducing their presence — part of the decoupling,” said a former employee.

Sales at the China arm fell nearly 20 per cent in 2023 from a year earlier, while the Asia-Pacific region as a whole contributed 11.7 per cent of IBM’s $62bn in revenues. The tech group has also been trimming staff in other regions to boost its bottom line.

Some affected IBM employees in China were given the option to relocate to other countries, while others were offered severance based on the length of their employment if they agreed to their exit packages within three weeks, two staff members said.

The US group closed another big R&D unit — the Beijing-based China Research Lab — in 2021.

Another former employee noted IBM’s business in China faced difficulties. “Just like it sold the ThinkPad [laptop] business to Lenovo, it now has to shut down CDL and CSL. The businesses were not making good profits,” the person said.

Chinese corporate records show IBM has more than 7,500 staff in the country, with a big office in the north-eastern city of Dalian. A large research team in China could complicate winning contracts from the US government, a major customer for “Big Blue”.

IBM said it “adapts its operations as needed to best serve our clients, and these changes will not impact our ability to support clients across Greater China region”.

In a memoir of his time in the Trump Administration, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster recalls telling his wife he could not understand Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “hold” on President Trump.

The same book insists that during McMaster’s 13 months, the United States did much to revise its global strategies to face a changing world.

McMaster writes of struggling to help the president avoid mistakes, like responding to Putin’s flattery in embarrassing ways. Yet McMaster says he was not one of the officials around Trump who believed their job was to protect the country from his erratic or dangerous moves.

McMaster is both a scholar–author of Dereliction of Duty, an acclaimed history of U.S. military decision making in the Vietnam war–and a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I had been on the receiving end of policies and strategies developed in Washington that made no sense to me when I was in places like Baghdad or Kabul,” he said in an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep. So when offered the top NSC job, he accepted. “I saw it as an opportunity to help a disruptive president disrupt a lot of what needed to be disrupted in the area of foreign policy and in national security.”

That’s at least part of the story he’s telling in his new book – At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House.

The other part recounts moments when McMaster had to navigate the fact that Trump himself was manipulated by aides at home and dictators abroad.

Speaking ahead of the release of his book August 27, he said he wouldn’t serve in a Trump administration again. “If President Trump was re-elected, of course I wish him [the] best and I want him to succeed. If our next president is Kamala Harris, I wish her the best, wish her to succeed,” he said on Morning Edition. “But I think my opportunity to serve in the Trump administration is used up.”

He does however urge others to serve and do the best they can.

On his working relationship with Trump, McMaster writes in an excerpt from his book: “I was the principal voice telling him that Putin was using him and other politicians in both parties in an effort to shake Americans’ confidence in our democratic principles, institutions and processes. Putin was not and would never be Trump’s friend. I felt it was my duty to point this out.”

But Trump made his own judgment calls, often taking a contrarian viewpoint.

“You know what President Trump was driven by is actually, I think, what President Obama was driven by and President George W. Bush was driven by when they were early in their administrations with Putin,” McMaster said. “Putin is a great liar. He’s a great deceiver.” He offers each new president flattery and the prospect of global cooperation. “So I would alert the president to this. He often didn’t want to hear it.”

McMaster talked of competing interests within Trump’s inner circle, from White House adviser Steve Bannon’s influence to Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson often breaking protocol and working around McMaster’s National Security Council.

He characterized high level jobs in the White House in one of three ways.

“The first category are people who go into the administration to help the elected president determine his or her own agenda.” McMaster saw his role in this way.

“The second group of people come into any White House or any administration to advance their own agenda. The third group of people are people who are motivated mainly by the desire to protect the country and maybe the world from the president. And I think in the Trump administration, that second and third category of people were quite large.”

One of the dysfunctional moments McMaster describes in his book involves remarks Trump was giving in May 2017 at NATO headquarters in Belgium. Trump, like his predecessors, wanted to push NATO nations to spend more on their own defense. When McMaster learned that Trump had cut a line from his prepared speech affirming the U.S. commitment to defend its allies, he pressured a reluctant Tillerson and Mattis to join him in dissuading Trump from such a move. While they convinced him to modify the speech, Trump’s skepticism of the NATO alliance has never gone away.

In his current presidential campaign, Trump has again repeated that he might not support those NATO allies who aren’t meeting their commitment to spend 2% of their GDP on defense.

The radio version of this interview was produced by Lilly Quiroz, and the digital version was edited by Majd Al-Waheidi.