THE HAGUE, May 21 (Reuters) - Royal Dutch/Shell CEOPeter Voser may be making his last appearance on the podium atthe company's annual shareholder meeting on Tuesday, turning thespotlight on management's plans for a successor.
Voser announced his surprise decision three weeks ago tostep down in the first half of 2014, before his 56th birthday,and less than five years into the role.
Employees of the 180-year old Anglo-Dutch group, whichtraditionally grows its own top executives, believe an import isunlikely to get the top job, but Voser is only the second personto hold the CEO role under a simplified corporate structureintroduced in 2005.
Shell's chairman Jorma Ollila, who will run Tuesday's AGM,also chairs the three-man nomination and succession committeethat will choose Voser's replacement.
The other two members, drawn from the ranks of Shell'snon-executive directors, are Josef Ackermann, the formerDeutsche Bank chief, and Hans Wijers, who ran Dutch chemicalsgroup Akzo Nobel until 2012.
Voser has been a pillar of Shell's new-found stability sincehe re-joined the company as finance director in October 2004 aspart of a wholesale clear-out of disgraced former topmanagement.
He leaves Shell with a leading global production andtechnology position in Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) and gas toliquids. Shell is also strong in oil exploration and offshoreproduction in the Gulf of Mexico and West Africa, and has awell-developed relationship with China, where the oil industryhas strong growth potential, plus long-term assets in Canadianoil sands.
But the group suffers regular sabotage and theft from itsonshore installations in Nigeria, where it is the biggestwestern producer, and has made little progress with its costlyArctic drilling programme in recent years.
Like its big rivals, Shell is being squeezed by risingfinding and development costs as prices and demand stagnate.
The world number-two investor-controlled company byproduction behind Exxon-Mobil, Shell has said it willlook outside for Voser's replacement as well as inside.
Inside Shell, the current finance director, Simon Henry, isregarded as a potential front-runner for Voser's job along withMarvin Odum, the company's head of upstream operations in theAmericas.
Henry has a mathematics and accounting background eventhough, like Odum, he joined the company as an engineer. Odumwould be Shell's first American CEO.
Andrew Brown, who became head of international upstream lastyear, could be a candidate too, as could director of projectsand technology Matthias Bichsel. One company source said Brown'srelatively recent appointment may make him an outside bet, whileBichsel, born in 1954, might be considered too old for the job.
