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BHP announced that Brandon Craig, its head of the Americas, has been appointed chief executive, as the world’s largest mining company focuses its growth strategy on copper and potash.
Craig will succeed Mike Henry, who has been BHP chief executive since the start of 2020, on July 1, the Australian company said early on Wednesday local time.
Henry, who had been tipped to step down this year, presided over a reshaping of BHP that involved reducing exposure to coal, exiting oil and gas and seeking growth in booming global demand for copper.
However, Henry failed with two attempts to acquire rival Anglo American that were aimed at boosting BHP’s copper portfolio.
Ross McEwan, chair of BHP, hailed Craig’s extensive experience and expressed confidence he would “advance the company’s unrivalled pipeline of growth options”.
Craig, who has worked at BHP since 1999, was one of several internal candidates for the top manager job. These included Geraldine Slattery, head of BHP’s Australian business, chief financial officer Vandita Pant, and chief commercial officer Rag Udd.
McEwan, the former chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland, has been considering options for Henry’s successor since he was appointed BHP chair last year.
Kaan Peker, analyst at RBC Capital Markets, said Craig’s operational experience would have been “paramount” in his promotion, given his record of running BHP’s key copper assets, including Escondida in Chile, Vicuna in Argentina and the Resolution project in the US.
BHP reported last month that copper contributed the largest share of its profit for the first time, accounting for 51 per cent of underlying earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation at the company’s first-half results for 2025-26.
Craig, 53, has been in charge of BHP’s Jansen potash operations in Canada, which Henry has pinpointed as a key source of future growth.
Craig also ran the company’s iron ore business in western Australia during the Covid pandemic.
“He ticks a lot of the same boxes that Mike Henry ticked,” Peker said.
Craig’s elevation to what is considered to be the biggest job in Australian business also represents the latest changing of the guard in the global mining industry.
Simon Trott, another western Australian iron ore veteran, was promoted last year to chief executive of Rio Tinto.
Slattery and Pant were considered frontrunners to succeed Henry as BHP chief executive among investors.
Slattery had also been linked to the vacant chief executive role at Woodside, the Australian oil and gas company, after Meg O’Neill left to run BP.
Woodside said on Wednesday that Liz Westcott, a former ExxonMobil executive who has been its interim chief executive, would now take on the role on a permanent basis.
