ANGLO American said it had appointed Stuart Chambers (61) as its chairman who will succeed Sir John Parker who is to step down from the board on October 31 after eight years at the helm.
Chambers, a chemical engineer by training, has worked in the industrial, logistics and consumer industries sectors and served as chairman of ARM Holdings plc and Rexham until 2016.
“It is a great privilege to be appointed chairman of a company as iconic as Anglo American, in this its centenary year,” said Chambers in a statement this morning. He said the group had emerged from the commodity price correction with “a new sense of purpose”. Chambers will take up the chairmanship from September 1.
In recent years, Chambers has served as a non-executive director on the boards of Smiths Group plc and Tesco plc, amongst others, following an executive career at Nippon Sheet Glass (formerly Pilkington), Mars Corporation and Shell.
“I am looking forward to working with Stuart as we continue our rebuilding of Anglo American,” said Mark Cutifani, CEO of Anglo American.
“We have materially restored Anglo American’s balance sheet and transformed the business performance over the last three years, and our task now is to unlock the very considerable value that we can see from our world-class asset base,” he said.
“Our tech analyst considers ARM to be one of the best companies he has ever covered, so at least some of this must reflect on Stuart,” said Investec Securities in a morning note.
“But we hope it is not portentous that Stuart was the Chairman of ARM Holdings and Rexam, when both were been taken over! Anglo is the first to appoint a new Chair, with RIO and BHP also looking,” it said.
