United Parcel Service Inc. chose its long-time CFO, vice chairman Scott Davis, to succeed Mike Eskew as chairman and CEO when Eskew steps down at the end of 2007.

Replacing Davis as CFO is Kurt Kuehn, senior vice president of global sales and marketing, and a member of the UPS Management Committee. Kuehn is a 30-year UPS veteran, having joined the company nine years before Davis went to work there. Davis joined UPS when it acquired technology company II Morrow, where he was CEO. He became UPS finance chief six years ago.

Kuehn also served as UPS’s first vice president of investor relations, after playing a key role in the 1999 UPS initial public offering. As a member of the international marketing department in 1993 he helped launch international services during UPS’s expansion.

The Atlanta-based package delivery company and supply-chain services provider described the 55-year-old Davis’s CFO term as one in which he served with Eskew as “an architect of the UPS strategy, helping the company expand through acquisitions and investments in new products and technology.”

After rising through finance and accounting positions, with one short break from the company, Davis joined the UPS Management Committee in 2001, when he became CFO. He earned the vice chairman title in 2006 and was elected to the board the same year.

An Oregon native and a CPA, Davis spent his early finance career with Arthur Andersen. He has completed the Advanced Management Program at the Wharton School. In late 1998, while UPS was still private, he left the company to become CEO of Overseas Partners Ltd., a Bermuda reinsurance company, rejoining the by-then-public Atlanta company as vice president of finance in 2000.

He also serves as deputy chairman of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, and is a director of Honeywell International Inc. He is also chairman of the Georgia Council on Economic Education.