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It took about five years for Cutifani to fix the problems and take Anglo on a new trajectory. He fixed the balance sheet, rolled out a streamlined project pipeline and drove a new operational model, innovating on skills, resources and technical deployment.

“I was part of Mark’s team from day one, really,” says Wanblad of the years from 2013 to 2022. “I feel like we built this business together with the rest of the GMC [group management committee], so it’s not like there is anything I want to change significantly from a strategy point of view. I’m really very much part of what we created under Mark and this is what I’d like to build and take forward.”

In practical terms, this means building out the projects already under the hood: Mogalakwena, a PGM mine held in Anglo’s 80%-owned Anglo American Platinum (Amplats); the expansion of Collahuasi, an operating copper mine in Chile; a greenfields polymetallic project in Finland called Sakatti; and Quellaveco, the $6bn, 300,000t-a-year Peruvian copper mine that is presently ramping up.

Quellaveco has analysts purring. “We think continuing execution on the company’s key growth driver, the Quellaveco copper project, will be the main driver for a rerating,” Goldman Sachs analyst Geydar Mamedov and colleagues write in a recent note on Anglo, which they rate a buy. Quellaveco represents a 40% year-on-year increase in Anglo’s copper production, which rivals such as Glencore and BHP can’t match. The metal will make up 33% of Anglo’s earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation in the 2023 financial year — the largest contributor by commodity — compared with 2022.

But if any single asset or project is going to benchmark Wanblad, it’s got to be Woodsmith, an enormous deposit a kilometre beneath the UK’s North York Moors containing the soil nutrient mineral polyhalite — a type of potash that improves crop yield.

The project was controversial for Anglo because its £405m acquisition in 2019 was considered pricey, given that its owner, Sirius Metals, was in funding difficulties. Then Anglo extended the project’s approval by a year, raising concerns about its technical aspects.

Woodsmith is particularly relevant for Wanblad because he’s the guy who put it at the sharp end of Anglo’s business strategy. In his view, it’s the cat’s pyjamas: “It’s a minimum of a 50-year-life orebody, possibly longer. If we get this right, it’s going to supply high-quality, low-carbon fertiliser products for decades, absolutely decades.”

A large portion of Anglo’s production is geared towards battery metals such as copper and nickel. The market for soil nutrients, however, is a new departure for Anglo and could become a differentiator in a similar fashion to its 85% stake in diamond company De Beers. Diamonds, the ultimate nonfungible, require the sort of market intelligence and strong bonds with customers that De Beers is skilled at managing. Anglo thinks marketing its polyhalite will require similar

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Duncan Wanblad, Anglo’s executioner
In the eight months he’s been in the Anglo American hot seat, CEO Duncan Wanblad has set about executing the strategy decisions made under his predecessor, Mark Cutifani — and building some of his own legacy projects.

You can’t blame Anglo American CEO Duncan Wanblad for sounding a shade weary when asked if there’s the pressure of expectation in the wake of the retirement, in April, of Mark Cutifani — his predecessor of nine years. It’s what everyone connected with Anglo has been talking about.

“It doesn’t worry me,” says Wanblad. “It’s not something I have to do anything about.”

No doubt about it, Cutifani is a tough act to follow. The group helped burnish this perception in May with a sumptuous feast in his honour at its Vergelegen wine estate. Once the valedictories were over, however, there was still a company to run — a company, lest anyone needs reminding, that Cutifani transformed from tractor to race car.

Strapped into the driver’s seat is Wanblad, a 55-year-old mining engineer who, despite waging an upwardly mobile career exclusively at Anglo since 1994, still conveys the bloom of youth. “I don’t feel it,” he says when asked about this. But travel fatigue has got to him lately, he adds.

Wanblad has been criss-crossing Anglo’s operations in South America, Africa, Australia and Europe in an effort to “set up my own relationships”. It might be more time in the air than he’d prefer, but Wanblad has to establish “his own CEO stamp in the glare of some pretty extreme hype around his predecessor”, as one UK analyst describes it.

So far, the feedback from the investment community is encouraging. “He’s definitely the right man for the job,” says Tim Clark, an analyst at Standard Bank Group Equities in Joburg. “He knows platinum group metals [PGMs], he ran Anglo’s base metals division, and for the past five years, Duncan’s been head of business development, sitting in an office right next door to the CEO.”

The way Wanblad sees it — the name is pronounced with a “W” and a “D” at the end — there is a logic that makes his transition from team man to company leader relatively smooth. While being “delighted” that the board chose him as CEO over a shortlist of internal candidates, it makes sense that as head of strategy he’s inheriting some of the decisions he helped make.

“Mark was sort of repositioning and I’m an executioner of that repositioning,” says Wanblad.

When Cutifani took over Anglo in 2013, the company was in big trouble. It had lost a lot of its technical expertise and had overcommitted its balance sheet, largely on an iron ore mine in Brazil that led to Anglo passing the dividend. Meanwhile, the market for commodities was beginning to cool. The previous CEO, Cynthia Carroll, quit in 2012.

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