Robert D. Walter
American businessman
Robert D. Walter (born 1944) is an American businessman best known for his role in the creation of Cardinal Health.
Early life
Walter graduated from St. Charles Preparatory School in Columbus, Ohio, and received a B.A. degree from Ohio University in 1967. Walter later attended Harvard Business School, where he received an MBA.
Career
In 1971, he founded Cardinal Foods after purchasing Monarch Foods, a small Ohio food wholesaler. In less than a decade his company became a regional food distributor. In 1979, the company acquired Bailey Drug Company and began wholesaling drugs. He renamed the company Cardinal Health. By 1983, the company went public and, under Walter's direction, achieved $1 billion in revenue in 1991.
In subsequent years, the company experienced extraordinary growth, "one of a handful of large U.S. companies that had achieved earnings-per-share growth in excess of 20 percent for 15 years straight." Cardinal Health is now a Fortune 100 company and one of the largest distributors of pharmaceuticals, health & beauty products, and hospital supplies in the United States. In 2007, he was #14 on Fortune magazine's list of the 25 top-paid male executives, with total compensation of $42.7 million the previous year.
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This entry incorporates text from “Robert D. Walter” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.