Kloppers resigns, replaced by insider Andrew MacKenzie

We have a long standing {insert word that rhymes with spoke/smoke/broke} in the office here, where Byron can't sleep before the BHP Billiton results because he is so excited. Of course that is not true, but we always have a chuckle. Not laughing I guess is Marius Kloppers. Or perhaps he is, who knows? We did know that he was going to retire at some stage, that was telegraphed last November. This morning, along with interim results, Marius Kloppers has announced his resignation. No doubt to spend more time with his fishing rod, I mean his family and garden. Kloppers has been at the helm of BHP Billiton since the 1st of October 2007 when Chip Goodyear resigned. Previous to that Kloppers ran the Non-Ferrous Materials division, and has been at the group since the beginning in 2001. Kloppers went to school just down the drag here, at the corner of Jan Smuts and Empire, at Helpmekaar.


Kloppers has worked at Mintek and Sasol for a short amount of time. He first however obtained a chemical engineering degree from Tuks and then he managed a Phd from MIT. That was not good enough, he went on to get an MBA from INSEAD. And he is a vegetarian, so no horse meat has passed through those lips. I found quite a *nice* old bio in the FT of Kloppers, it is worth a read: Man in the News: Marius Kloppers. Because the retirement coincides with an expected slump in profits, comparisons are drawn between Cynthia Carroll of Anglo American and Tom Albanese of Rio Tinto. But, if you quickly look at the respective share prices from when Kloppers took over, you can quickly tell that he has done a whole lot better. Kloppers took over on the 1st of October 2007, the month coincidently that the Dow Jones and S&P 500 reached their all time highs, so that should have been near the top I guess. Since then, to present day, BHP Billiton is up 35 percent in London. The FTSE 100 is down over a percent since then. But more importantly, if you want the Carroll and Albanese comparison, then you will quickly see that Anglo American is down 37 percent since then, and Rio Tinto is down 8 and a quarter percent. So there you go, if you needed a comparison.


Kloppers is young, only 50, I suspect that he will pop up somewhere soon, there would be a certain irony if he went on to replace Andrew Liveris (an Aussie by birth and in contention for the BHP Billiton job when Kloppers got it) at Dow Chemicals in the US. So, good luck to him and what looks like a really tight family. The fellow replacing Kloppers looks like a magnificent replacement. He has extensive mining and petroleum experience, having worked for both Rio Tinto and BP. This replacement does tell me that BHP Billiton are increasingly going to move towards the energy side of their business, something that they have been doing already of course. Andrew MacKenzie was actually hired by Marius Kloppers from Rio Tinto, where he spent 4 years, the previous 22 years had been at BP. In his last years at BP, MacKenzie was working for BP's petrochemicals business in the US. He seems like a wonderful replacement, I suspect that he definitely will be a one term guy, six odd years, because by that time he will be 62 or so. An excellent end to a career at BHP Billiton and a wonderful replacement in the form of MacKenzie ushers in the "energy" era for BHP Billiton.