Avient Corporation has appointed Mike Frank president and chief executive officer with immediate effect, recruiting the head of a five billion dollar agricultural solutions business to run the Ohio specialty materials group. The company announced the appointment in a regulatory filing and at the same time named Richard Fearon non-executive chairman of the board.
Frank arrives from UPL Corporation, the international arm of the Indian crop protection group, where he has been president and chief executive since twenty twenty two. Before that he spent four years as executive vice president of Nutrien and chief executive of Nutrien Ag Solutions, the retail distribution business that sits at the customer-facing end of the world's largest fertiliser producer and which turns over roughly fourteen billion dollars.
The bulk of his career was at Monsanto, where he spent twenty five years and finished as global chief commercial officer, having earlier run the company's business in China. He holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management and an engineering degree from the University of Saskatchewan, and has sat on the board of Ag Growth International since the spring of twenty twenty one.
The hire tells you something about where Avient believes its problem sits. The company was created out of PolyOne and has spent several years repositioning itself from a commodity polymer compounder into a specialty materials business, selling engineered composites, colourants and performance additives into packaging, healthcare, transport and consumer markets. That repositioning is substantially complete at the portfolio level. What it has not consistently delivered is commercial growth, and Frank's record is in commercial leadership of large distribution and agricultural input businesses rather than in materials science.
Appointing a chief executive from outside the polymer industry is therefore a deliberate signal. Avient is hiring a route-to-market operator rather than a technologist, which suggests the board reads its own constraint as demand generation and customer coverage rather than product capability.
Fearon's appointment as non-executive chairman separates the chairman and chief executive roles at the top of the company, a governance structure that American industrial boards have moved toward steadily over the past decade and which gives an incoming external chief executive an independent counterweight from the start.
Avient is listed in New York and reports annual revenue in the region of three billion dollars across its specialty engineered materials and colour additives segments. It employs roughly nine thousand people and serves customers in more than one hundred countries.
