By Rob Davies
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In charge: Anglo American's Cynthia Carroll
Every list that matters places her among the world’s most powerful women, but on this wet June morning Anglo American chief Cynthia Carroll is struggling to be heard.
In a huskier version of her New Jersey alto, she explains that somewhere between board meetings and investor chats, she has lost her voice.
Thankfully it’s a less serious mishap than that which befell her just weeks before the firm’s full-year results in February.
While horseback riding with her daughter, her steed reared up and rudely threw the boss of a £28bn global enterprise to the ground, fracturing her hip in the process.
The horse’s name?
‘Patriot!’ she cries. ‘Of all names!’
It’s an uncharacteristically high-decibel exclamation for someone who comes across as tough but tranquil. She is keeping her cool in the midst of the economic maelstrom, in the firm conviction that Anglo American has the assets and the peo ple to weather the storm.
‘In the medium term to long term we are very bullish about the commodities we’re in and the future outlook for supply and demand.
‘We think that if China drops from a GDP growth rate of 8 per cent to 7 per cent, it is still not a bad thing.’
Like most other mining bosses, she believes the pressing issue is the world’s struggle to produce raw materials, not about a lack of appetite for them.
‘The industry is struggling to deliver the supplies to meet demand and it cuts across virtually all commodities we’re in, whether it’s copper, iron ore or metallurgical coal.
‘Companies have all sorts of plans and projects but the challenge is to get the permits, to get the people, to get access to infrastructure, to be sure you’re dealing in an environment which is predictable and where governments are not going to change the rules of the game.’
She makes a compelling case for Anglo’s ability to skirt these pitfalls.
‘We have a broader range of commodities and options around progress and future growth than anybody else in the industry. Nobody’s got that breadth of resources that we’re sitting on to develop.’
But there are areas in which even a diversified miner such as Anglo is feeling the pinch.
The platinum industry, in which Anglo rules the roost, is wrestling with labour disputes, high costs and low prices.
‘Platinum prices are not where they should be and that reflects the nervousness in the market and what’s happening in Europe.
‘Because about 20 per cent of the platinum going into autocatalysts [catalytic converters] is for Europe and about 30 per cent of overall platinum sales come into Europe, it’s not a good situation.’
Once more, she prefers to focus on reasons for optimism in the longer term. She is hopeful that the rise of fuel cells â€" which employ platinum to generate electricity through chemical reactions â€" will support demand.
In the diamond industry, things haven’t been nearly as rough. ‘In the US consumer buying has been much stronger than we imagined last year,’ she says. ‘The demand for luxury goods around the world has just been phenomenal and I would say the outlook is very, very good.’
At the end of last year, Carroll paid more than £3bn for the Oppenheimer family’s 40 per cent stake in diamond giant De Beers, taking Anglo’s stake to 80 per cent.
In the light of how demand had held up, she is pretty pleased w ith her end of the deal. ‘Analysts and shareholders came to us and said congratulations, this is a home run. We did extremely well.’
But while the clamour for sparklers among Hollywood stars and Shanghai businessmen is important to Carroll, she sets her stall out as a FTSE boss who gives as much thought to the people who dig up precious metals as those who wear them.
Rivals such as Glencore and ENRC have come under the spotlight for how they do business in some of the poorest parts of the world, whether it be over the environment or dealings with corrupt governments.
While she won’t mention industry peers by name, the American is very clear that there are dozens of regions where local communities don’t share much of the wealth that Western firms dig from beneath their feet.
‘Let’s take Peru. It’s a country where historically mining companies have been abusive… they’ve taken advantage.’
She checks herself.
‘Actually, taking advantage is not the right phrase. Very innocently sometimes, they think their job is to go in, mine, develop, employ a few people and then leave.
Shareholders are OK with that. That’s one model. But in most cases people don’t see the benefit. They don’t have a community when the mine is closed, the economics of the community are gone, they depended on the mine. That’s a very sad thing.’
But are there companies who deliberately exploit poor governance to make money at the expense of the world’s poorest? The diplomacy of a mining industry representative overtakes her for a moment.
‘The good, able players in the industry are not going in saying “Let’s take it out and run for cover.†Standards are improving substantially. The difficulty is that if there is a bad actor, everybody feels the pain and people say we’ve got to increase taxes… There are bad actors. I’ve suggested to gov ernments that they have to get on top of this and they can’t tolerate it.
‘But in some countries they have no other place to turn, no other sources of income or employment and that’s a terrible thing.
‘In the case of the DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo], they’re struggling because they don’t have the capacity to respond as fast or as systematically as they need to.’
Anglo, she insists, is not one of the ‘bad actors’. She points to initiatives in health, education, HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, as well as an emphasis on building capability among local people to ensure that they do not become reliant on the firms’ presence.
One of her most storied moments as a chief executive was when, alarmed by a fatality rate that seemed to be out of control, she brought 28,000 miners to the surface.
‘We said to the government and to the unions, we’re going to uplift the standard and everyone had to get with the programme. A lot of people were not happy with us.’
Dyed-in-the-wool environmentalists, particularly in the US, might shake their heads at all of this.
Anglo has attracted its own controversy over plans for a mine at Pebble in Alaska, which opponents say could ruin local fishing communities due to the immense amounts of fresh water that would need to be diverted into the pit.
Mining and fishing ‘can co-exist and thrive’, she believes, adding that the fiercest opposition comes not from Alaskans but from Seattle environmentalists with little understanding of how few choices those economically-starved communities are left with.
‘I know they’ve had all sorts of ideas up their sleeve to get us to back off and we’re not going to back off. The Pebble opposition is funded by people with very deep pockets, spending about $15m a year.’
The controversy saw her labelled ‘Cyanide Cynthia’, but it is a moniker she shrugs off easily. ‘No it doesn’t hurt me, because I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t believe in it.’
When the inevitable question about women in boardrooms arises, far from brushing off a question she must have been asked dozens of times, she takes it head on.
‘We have more women in this organisation than any other mining company in the world and I’ve said to our executive team that there are targets that we have to get to.’
Carroll was not only the first non-South African to run Anglo, but also the first woman.
And as a mother of four, she often refers back to the importance of nurturing good people ahead oftechnology or financial engineering.
‘This is a generation with technology everywhere…my children, they’re fluent. But no matter how advanced you are with technology, no matter where we get to, at the end of the day it will come down to people.’
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