Posts By Date - Green Markets

New President Announced for Agrium Retail

Agrium Inc. announced on Aug. 22 that Mike Frank has accepted the position of president of Agrium Retail, effective Sept. 18, 2017. Frank will be responsible for all of Agrium’s global Retail operations, including Crop Production Services (CPS) in North America, Landmark in Australia, and the company’s South American retail operations.

“We are very excited to welcome Mike to Agrium. With almost three decades of experience in agriculture, he is very well known and highly respected across the crop input industry,” said Chuck Magro, Agrium president and CEO. “Mike has a clear mandate to grow our Retail business. He is an exceptional people leader, and I look forward to working with him to continue to develop and grow our talent and business to ensure we remain the leading provider of crop inputs and solutions for our global farm customers.”

Frank comes to Agrium from Monsanto, where he held a variety of senior positions, recently serving as the lead Monsanto senior executive planning the pending integration with Bayer. Frank’s last position with Monsanto was vice president and chief commercial officer of the company’s global business. He previously held vice president roles across a number of divisions within Monsanto, including Global Manufacturing, Supply Chain operations, Crop Protection Business, Global Product Strategy, and International Commercial operations. Frank earlier served as president of Monsanto China.

Frank has also been on the boards of CropLife International and CropLife America, as well as World Trade Center St. Louis. He holds an agricultural engineering degree from the University of Saskatchewan and an MBA from Northwestern University.

BHP Says Will Not Seek Approval for Jansen in Calendar 2018

August 22, 2017Breaking Industry News, Potash, Saskatchewanwebster@kennedyinfo.com

BHP Ltd. said it will not be seeking the go-ahead for its Jansen potash project in Saskatchewan next year due to uncertain timing of the need for new supply of the nutrient.

“As we continue to work on improving the risk return metrics of the project, we will not be seeking board approval in the 2018 calendar year,” BHPs chief financial officer, Peter Beaven, said in an earnings call earlier today.

“While timing is uncertain, we have no doubt that the world will need new potash supply. When it does, we believe Jansen is best placed,” he said.”But Jansen will not proceed unless it passes our strict capital allocation tests.”

As recently as this past May, BHP CEO Andrew Mackenzie said the decision by the mining giant’s board could come as early as June 2018 (GM May 19, p.1).

BHP expects Jansen’s two production and service shafts to be finished probably by the end of 2019, at which point, it said it will have totally de-risked the project.

“At that point, we will only be three years away from first potash when we think it’s appropriate to make the right kind of cyclical investment,” said Mackenzie in today’s earnings call. “And that’s the big question which will be determined by how it [the market] looks, and we have said today that we will wait at least another couple of years, and if we need to wait longer, we will wait longer.”

BHP says it believes there will be a requirement for some form of new greenfield production “some time” in the 2020s. The mining behemoth on August 22 reported an underlying profit of US$6.73 billion, up from the year-ago US$1.22 billion.