This is the second installment in our continent-wise shout-out to newly appointed CEOs actually worth knowing, following our North America coverage. This one covers Europe, starting with a succession that came after a genuinely rigorous, months-long process rather than a quick internal handoff.
Luke Miels — GSK
Miels became CEO of GSK (GlaxoSmithKline) on January 1, 2026, succeeding Dame Emma Walmsley, who had led the pharmaceutical giant since 2017. The appointment followed a formal process announced in September 2025 that explicitly considered both internal and external candidates, rather than defaulting to the most obvious internal successor — a detail GSK’s own board specifically highlighted as evidence of a rigorous, not automatic, decision.
Miels, an Australian national, joined GSK in 2017 as Chief Commercial Officer, where he was central to building out the company’s specialty medicines portfolio — particularly in oncology and respiratory disease, two of the more scientifically demanding and commercially significant categories in modern pharma. Before GSK, he spent time at AstraZeneca running its European business, and before that, ran Roche’s Asia operations from Shanghai and then Singapore — a career path that’s given him direct operating experience across three continents, not just a single home market.
Why he’s worth watching: GSK’s specialty portfolio, the area Miels personally helped build, is central to the company’s growth strategy going forward — his appointment isn’t a leadership change layered on top of an existing strategy, it’s closer to the architect of that strategy now running the whole company.
Per Narvinger — Ericsson
Narvinger was appointed President and CEO of Ericsson, the Swedish telecommunications equipment giant, effective October 1, 2026, succeeding Börje Ekholm. Ericsson sits at a genuinely consequential point in the global technology infrastructure story — the company is one of a small handful of firms actually building the network equipment that 5G, and eventually 6G, infrastructure runs on, which means its leadership decisions carry weight well beyond the company’s own balance sheet.
Why he’s worth watching: telecom infrastructure investment cycles are long and capital-intensive, and a new CEO’s early strategic choices — which markets to prioritize, how aggressively to invest ahead of demand — tend to compound over years rather than resolve quickly, making the first 12 to 18 months of a tenure like this unusually informative about the company’s next decade.
Why succession process matters as much as the person
Both of these appointments followed a deliberate, disclosed process rather than a quiet internal handoff — GSK explicitly ran an external-and-internal search, and Ericsson’s transition was announced with a real lead time before it took effect. That’s worth noting on its own: how a company chooses its next CEO is itself a signal about institutional discipline, independent of who actually gets picked. Asia is next in this series.
