WPP has appointed a new chairman who will be expected to oversee the process of finding a successor to Sir Martin Sorrell.
Roberto Quarta will join the advertising group’s board on 1 January and become chairman-designate.
Quarta is chairman of Smith & Nephew, a FTSE 100 medical technology company, and engineering group IMI, which is on the FTSE 250. He is also a partner at US private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice.
He is expected to succeed Philip Lader, who has been chairman since 2001, at the annual meeting in June 2015.
Quarta became chairman of Smith & Nephew in April and will retain that role, but step down from IMI.
Alex DeGroote, media analyst at Peel Hunt, said that one of the tasks in the new chairman’s in-tray would be succession planning. Sorrell has been chief executive of WPP since 1986 and turns 70 in February.
Sorrell’s pay package soared by 70% to £30m last year – his biggest payout in almost a decade – following a windfall from WPP’s long-term incentive scheme.
Lader said that Quarta would bring extensive experience in corporate governance and global commerce to the company, while Sorrell said he would help develop WPP’s strategy in new markets, new media and “last but not least, horizontality”.
During Lader’s 14-year tenure, WPP’s billings have risen from £14bn to more than £46bn, while the shares have risen from 829p to £13.13, almost doubling the company’s market capitalisation to £17.3bn.
WPP had been threatened by the planned merger of rivals Omnicom and Publicis, but the deal fell apart earlier this year.
In the three months to September the company’s sales rose 3.1% to £2.76bn and grew by nearly 15% in the UK.
Its UK media and advertising business, which include the creative agencies JWT, Ogilvy and media buying agencies Mindshare and Maxus, helped operating profits increase by 15.7% to £205m for 2013.
The UK PR division, of which Hill + Knowlton and Burson-Marsteller are part, also performed strongly.
