Diageo has named Joanne Wilson as its next chief financial officer, bringing in the finance chief of the advertising group WPP to take over the drinks maker's accounts during the course of next year.
Wilson will join the Diageo board and the executive committee when she arrives. The company has not fixed a precise start date, saying only that she will take up the role some time next year, and Nik Jhangiani remains in post to hand over. WPP confirmed the move in its own announcement to the market on the same day, describing it as a chief financial officer succession at its end.
A finance career built in retail and consumer
Wilson is a chartered accountant who trained at KPMG and has spent most of her career on the consumer side of the economy rather than in media. She was chief financial officer of Britvic, the soft drinks group, before moving to WPP, and before that was chief financial officer of dunnhumby, the customer data business then owned by Tesco. Earlier she held finance and commercial roles at Tesco itself. She also sits as a non executive director of Informa.
That history is the most interesting thing about the appointment. Diageo's chief executive, Dave Lewis, ran Tesco for six years and the two overlapped there, so this is a chief executive recruiting a finance chief he has worked alongside rather than one introduced by a search firm. For a company in the middle of a turnaround that is a meaningful signal about how the top of the house intends to operate.
Her Britvic experience is the more directly relevant line on the record. Britvic is a drinks business with a franchise relationship at its centre, a concentrated customer base in the grocers and a cost structure exposed to commodity and packaging prices. Those are recognisably Diageo's problems at a different scale.
Why Diageo needed this filled
The appointment gives Diageo its third finance chief in under three years, which is the uncomfortable fact sitting behind the announcement. The company has been working through a period of weak demand in its key markets, a destocking cycle in Latin America that damaged its credibility with investors, and a debt load that has drawn scrutiny as earnings softened. Stability in the finance seat is not a cosmetic requirement in that situation.
The incoming chief financial officer inherits a specific agenda rather than an open brief. Diageo has committed to a cost savings programme and to reducing leverage, and it has been reviewing which brands it wants to keep. Each of those is a finance led exercise, and each will be judged on delivery within the next two reporting years.
There is also a question the appointment does not answer. Wilson is leaving WPP at a point when that company has its own difficulties, and the gap between her departure there and her arrival at Diageo is unusually long. A handover spread across a year gives Jhangiani time to close out the current reporting cycle, but it also means Diageo will spend most of the coming year with a finance chief who is leaving and a successor who has not yet arrived.
About Diageo
Diageo is a British multinational drinks company whose brands include Johnnie Walker, Guinness, Smirnoff, Tanqueray and Don Julio. It is listed in London and New York and sells in nearly every market in the world.
