Fonterra wraps NZ consumer business under Australia's Judith Swales in latest restructure

Wednesday 28th October 2015

Fonterra Cooperative Group's local consumer businesses will come under the purview of Australian managing director Judith Swales in the latest restructure at the world's biggest dairy exporter.

Swales has been promoted to managing director Oceania, a new unit that adds the New Zealand consumer business to Fonterra's Australian segment, it said in a statement. Swales joins Fonterra's management team, having run the Australian unit for the past two years. Fonterra Brands New Zealand will continue to run as a standalone unit in New Zealand, with its managing director reporting to Melbourne based Swales.

"Judith has a great understanding of consumers and their relationship to brands and has proven her ability to build effective partnerships in the highly competitive supermarket sector in Australia," chief executive Theo Spierings said. "Judith has already achieved progress in a difficult environment and the turnaround is reaching a point where she is more than capable of taking on expanded responsibilities."

Fonterra is running the ruler over its operations, and has so far laid off 750 staff in administration roles, ingredients sales, consumer, marketing, research and development, communications, health and safety, food safety and quality, group resilience and risk, property, procurement and change management in an effort to achieve annual savings of $103 million.

Adding Swales to the senior management team is the second reshuffle this year after Spierings appointed Jacqueline Chow as the newly-created chief operating officer, velocity, and expanded Johan Priem's role to Asia, Middle East and Africa from his previous mandate in charge of Greater China.

The bundling of the consumer business into the Australia segment comes after Fonterra yesterday launched a new range of Anchor branded cream across the Tasman for the first time, selling the product exclusively at Woolworths supermarkets.

Spierings said bringing the brands portfolio and businesses together was in line with Fonterra's drive to improve efficiency.

Fonterra's consumer and food service unit derived about $51 million in earnings from its Oceania segment in the year ended July 31, about 13 percent of total earnings. A year earlier, the segment contributed a loss of $24 million.

Units in the Fonterra Shareholders' Fund, which gives investors exposure to the dairy company's earnings stream, increased 0.4 percent to $5.35, and have declined 11 percent this year.

BusinessDesk.co.nz

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