Avient Corporation has appointed Richard Fearon as its non-executive chairman, separating the roles of chairman and chief executive as part of the same leadership refresh that named Mike Frank chief executive.
Fearon has sat on the Avient board for several years and brings a long record in industrial finance and corporate development. He spent close to two decades at Eaton Corporation, the power management group, serving as vice chairman and chief financial and planning officer until March 2021. In that role he was responsible for Eaton's finances and for the acquisition and portfolio strategy that reshaped the company over that period, work directly relevant to a specialty materials business that has itself been built through acquisition.
Before Eaton he held senior roles at Transamerica, NatSteel, the Walt Disney Company, Booz Allen and the Boston Consulting Group. He also serves as a non-management director of Crown Holdings and of Waters Corporation. He holds a degree in economics from Stanford University and both an MBA and a law degree from Harvard University.
The appointment completes a conventional governance separation. Avient had combined the chairman and chief executive roles under its previous leadership, and splitting them at the point of a chief executive transition is the orthodox move for a United States listed company, both because it gives a new chief executive an independent board counterpart and because proxy advisers and large index investors have pressed steadily for the division. Promoting a sitting director rather than recruiting externally also preserves continuity on a board that is handing its executive leadership to someone new.
The commercial backdrop makes the choice of a finance and portfolio specialist look deliberate. Avient was created out of the former PolyOne after a sequence of transactions, including the purchase of the Clariant masterbatch business and later the DSM protective materials unit, and the resulting company carries both the opportunity and the debt load that such a programme produces. A chairman whose career was spent on capital allocation and acquisition integration at a larger industrial group is a sensible counterweight for a new chief executive who will have to decide how much further to reshape the portfolio and how quickly to deleverage.
Frank joins Avient from UPL Corporation. The two appointments were announced together, which gives the board a defined chairman and chief executive pairing from the start rather than a handover sequenced over several quarters.
Avient sells colourants, additives and engineered polymer formulations into end markets that include packaging, healthcare, transport and defence, and reports in two segments. Its recent trading has been shaped less by its own execution than by weak industrial demand across Europe and destocking among customers, which is the pattern across the specialty chemicals sector rather than anything particular to the company. The questions in front of the new chairman and chief executive are therefore familiar ones for the industry: where pricing can be held as input costs move, which product lines still justify the capital they absorb, and whether the balance sheet gives room for further acquisition at all.
