William “Bill” Collopy Jr. is retiring as head of operations for Boeing Co.’s Seal Beach-based Southern California operations.
Gary Toyama, former deputy to the vice president of Boeing’s St. Louis-based Integrated Defense Systems unit, was named as Collopy’s replacement.
Toyama, who earned a master’s in business administration at the University of California, Irvine, will be responsible for leading seven Boeing sites that employ nearly 32,000 people in Southern California, including about 12,000 workers in Anaheim, Huntington Beach, Seal Beach and Irvine.
Chicago-based Boeing is Orange County’s third-largest employer. Toyama will be responsible for participating in California state and local government affairs and providing leadership to Boeing’s local community charity programs.
Toyama joined Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based Rockwell International Corp. in the late 1970s and worked there until Boeing bought the company in the 1990s.
Toyama will report directly to Jim Albaugh, chief executive of Boeing’s Integrated Defense Systems.
Collopy will remain chairman of Sea Launch, which launches commercial satellites from the ocean. Boeing owns 40% of the company.
Collopy has led the company’s Southland operations since 2002. He oversaw the addition of about 700 workers at OC operations.
Some of the new hires were in Huntington Beach, which houses the technology hub for the Army’s $21 billion Future Combat Systems program. The company also made hires for its Naval operations at the Anaheim site.
Boeing’s Commercial Launch and Satellite Systems unit, which Collopy once headed, closed about two years ago amid an economic and telecom downturn.
Boeing, meanwhile, could lose some 1,000 employees in OC during the next few years. The company announced in early May it would combine production, engineering, test and launch operations at its Delta Rocket site in Huntington Beach with Lockheed Martin Corp.’s Atlas rocket operations in Denver.
As lead on the government relations team for Boeing, Collopy urged workers’
compensation reform and was active in business leadership groups.
Prior to his lead role in Southern California, Collopy was chief financial officer for Boeing Space and Communications group and oversaw the group’s joint ventures, including Sea Launch and United Space Alliance, which he helped start.
He also handled mergers and acquisitions for the group and headed up the team that bought Hughes Space and Communications. From 1988 to 1998 he was vice president and controller of Boeing North American’s Space Systems (the former defense business of what’s now Rockwell Automation).
Collopy started at Rockwell in 1973 as a financial analyst focusing on mergers and acquisitions at its Autonetics division in Anaheim.
