Pepco CEO to step down this year due to health reasons
Poundland owner Pepco has announced its chief executive officer Andy Bond will step down later this year due to health reasons.
Pepco Group, which owns discount retailer brands including PEPCO, Poundland and Dealz, said Bond will step down at the end of March. He is expected to stay on the board as an advisor until the end of the financial year.
Its group chief operating officer, Trevor Masters, will step into the role of interim CEO, the group revealed on Wednesday.
With the help of external support, the board will immediately begin a search process to evaluate internal and external candidates for the role.
“Every great journey must come to an end and it is with much reluctance that I have decided now is the right time to focus my energies on my health,” said Bond.
The firm made its stock market debut in Warsaw in May last year following the biggest initial public offering (IPO) in Poland.
Pepco trades from more than 3,500 stores across 17 countries and has hedged its bets on shoppers increasingly seeking out discount shops as inflation rates soar.
It has formulated plans to create 13,000 new jobs across Europe over the next three years, as reported by CityA.M. last year.
“Our consumer dynamic, our geographical spread and our business model make us most defendable against online and most unlikely to go online,” Bond told the Reuters news agency last year.
Poundland launched a small online trial in the UK to understand customer demand last year, with online delivery available to areas in the Midlands and Yorkshire.
“Personally, I’ve been very sceptical,” Bond, who has previously headed supermarket Asda, said in July last year.
He added: “However, it is such a macro trend, we’ve got to learn about it, because I have no intention of looking like the idiot who called the world flat when it was actually round.”