Will Stengel will become Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Motion, the industrial parts distribution business that Genuine Parts Company intends to separate into a standalone public company, under leadership and board appointments the Atlanta group disclosed on 9 September 2026.
Stengel is today Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Genuine Parts Company, and he will continue in that role until the separation closes. The company has said it expects the transaction to complete in the first quarter of 2027. On closing he moves across to run Motion, leaving the automotive business, which trades as NAPA in North America, to a new chief executive.
The appointment was set out in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission under Item 5.02, the section reserved for the departure and election of principal officers, and in a statement issued the same day naming the leadership teams and board leadership for both businesses.
Motion is the industrial half of a group that has operated as a single distribution company for decades, supplying bearings, power transmission components, hydraulics, automation and related industrial products to manufacturers and maintenance operations across North America and internationally. Separating it from the automotive business gives each a dedicated management team, a dedicated balance sheet and a dedicated investor base, and it gives Motion a chief executive who already knows the asset from the inside.
Stengel has run Genuine Parts Company through a period in which the group has leaned harder on the industrial side of its portfolio. He became Chief Executive Officer after a career that included senior operating roles within the group, and he has been Chairman as well as Chief Executive. Taking Motion rather than the larger automotive company is a deliberate choice of the smaller, more specialised business, and it signals that the group regards the industrial distribution franchise as the one with the clearer independent growth story.
He will not be building the Motion executive team from scratch. James Howe was appointed President and Chief Operating Officer of Motion with effect from 6 September 2026, having previously served as President of Motion, a role he took up in April 2024. Howe will report to Stengel in the standalone company.
At Genuine Parts Company, Court Carruthers was named Chief Executive Officer-elect and will become Chief Executive Officer of the automotive business on closing, while continuing to serve as a director. Bert Nappier was promoted to Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer with effect from 6 September 2026, adding the operating remit to the finance role he has held since 2022.
The sequencing matters for shareholders. By naming both chief executives and both senior operating teams several months before the separation is due to complete, the board has removed the leadership question from the list of things that could delay or complicate the transaction. It also means the two companies can begin to operate with distinct management attention well before they trade separately.
For customers and suppliers on the industrial side, the practical change is that Motion will answer to its own board and its own capital allocation decisions rather than competing internally with an automotive network many times its size. For Stengel, the move is a narrowing of scope and a deepening of it at the same time.
