The sixth and final installment in our continent-wise shout-out to newly appointed CEOs actually worth knowing, after North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America. This one covers Oceania.
Brandon Craig — BHP
Craig became CEO and a director of BHP Group on July 1, 2026, succeeding Mike Henry, who stepped down after six and a half years leading the company. Craig joined BHP in 1999 and has spent more than 25 years across the company’s operations, working in maintenance and engineering, marketing, human resources, and operational leadership across copper, iron ore, and coal.
His two most recent roles are the specific reason this appointment carries real weight: as President Americas, he led BHP’s growth strategy in copper across the US, Canada, and South America during a stretch in which BHP became the world’s largest copper producer, and before that, he led BHP’s Western Australia Iron Ore business, strengthening the company’s position as the lowest-cost, highest-margin major iron ore producer globally. Those aren’t general leadership credentials — they’re specific, measurable track records in the exact commodities BHP’s future depends on.
Why he’s worth watching: copper demand is central to the global energy transition — batteries, grid infrastructure, electric vehicles all depend on it — and BHP’s new CEO built his most recent track record specifically growing the company’s position in that commodity. His tenure will be a real test of whether that specific expertise translates into sustained advantage as global copper demand accelerates.
Richard Allen — Fonterra
Allen officially becomes CEO of Fonterra, the New Zealand-based cooperative that’s the world’s largest dairy exporter, on May 1, 2026, with outgoing CEO Miles Hurrell remaining in an advisory role until September to support the transition. Allen is a genuine company veteran — he joined Fonterra in 2008 as a graduate and has spent 18 years across a wide range of roles: president of the Atlantic region based in Chicago, vice-president of foodservice, leadership of Fonterra’s farmer-facing Farm Source arm, and founding CEO of MyMilk, a program giving farmers a path to supply limited milk volumes without becoming full cooperative members.
Most recently, he led Fonterra’s global ingredients business — the part of the company most directly exposed to international commodity pricing and global customer relationships, giving him a genuinely broad view of the business heading into the top role.
Why he’s worth watching: an 18-year internal veteran taking over the world’s largest dairy exporter, after building experience across farmer relations, global accounts, and ingredients specifically, is about as complete an internal preparation for a CEO role as this kind of succession gets — worth watching for how directly that breadth translates into strategy.
Closing this series
Six continents, thirteen leaders, each picked for a specific, checkable reason their appointment actually matters — not just because a title changed. A few patterns held across every region: deliberate, disclosed succession processes tended to produce stronger candidates than rushed ones, internal promotions with genuinely broad operational experience were common among the strongest picks, and more than one of these appointments broke a real historical pattern — first woman, first Brazilian-origin executive, a return to family leadership — rather than simply continuing business as usual. That’s a more interesting throughline than any single appointment on its own.
