Martin Weissburg is retiring as president of Mack Trucks. He will be succeeded June 1 by Stephen Roy at the Volvo Group manufacturing subsidiary.
Weissburg held three senior leadership positions in his Volvo career. In a 2020 FreightWaves interview, he called running Mack, an iconic brand dating to 1900, his favorite. He arrived in June 2018 in time for the launch of the brand’s flagship over-the-road Mack Anthem. A year later, he navigated a crippling labor strike . In 2020, Weissburg led Mack’s return to the medium-duty Class 6-7 market.
The United Auto Workers were on strike at Mack for 13 days in 2019. That shut down production at its plant near Allentown, Pennsylvania. The first walkout at Mack in 35 years also impacted production at the Volvo Trucks North America (VTNA) plant in New River Valley, Virginia, and an engine-making plant in Hagerstown, Maryland.
Returned Mack to medium-duty truck market
Perhaps the highlight for Weissburg was the opening of a $13 million converted comic book manufacturing plant in Roanoke, Virginia, to build the medium-duty MD Series trucks, a segment Mack had exited two decades earlier.
“To be the president of Mack on a day like today when we’re inaugurating a new facility, it’s not often in a person’s career you get to be part of something like that,” Weissburg said in January 2020.
The MD Series captured 3.7% of the segment in its first year. It is launching a battery-electric version of the MD Series.
Career similarities among Mack leaders
Weissburg led financial services for Volvo in the Americas from 2005 and globally from 2010 until taking over the Swedish truck maker’s construction equipment unit in 2014. He served on the Volvo Group’s executive board for a decade. In retirement, he is joining the board of Volvo’s North America transit bus subsidiary Nova Bus.
Like Weissburg, Roy comes to Mack from Volvo’s construction equipment unit, where he is head of the North America region. Roy has held senior roles within Mack Trucks, including president of Mack Trucks North America, executive leader of Uptime, Aftermarket and Soft Products, and Parts Sales and marketing for Mack and VTNA.
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Click for more FreightWaves articles by Alan Adler.
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