Amec FW appoints Halliburton man as new CEO, Q1 sales down

Amec Foster Wheeler has appointed 20-year Halliburton veteran Dr Jon Lewis as its new chief executive, and reported a decline in first-quarter sales.

In the three months to the end of March, the engineering group generated revenue of £1.3bn, which was down 1.5% against last year's result, and 3.1% lower on a like-for-like basis and adjusting for currency.

The order book stood had also contracted to £6.4bn at the end of March from £6.6bn at the year end, excluding $500m of projects on which its Global Power Group (GPG) had been selected as the supplier but which none of which has received go-ahead from customers so far this year.

GPG remains on the block anyway, with Amec saying talks with "a number of interested parties" and a disposal expected in the second half.

Several other non-core assets are also being prepared for sale, the FTSE 250 company said, which are expected to provide the major contribution to the plan to halve its circa-£1bn net debt by mid-2017.

Chairman John Connolly, who did not change the board's full-year outlook for a slight like-for-like revenue decline and only a slight reduction in trading margins, said new CEO Lewis brought a reputation for "safe and ethical operations, strategic market insight, strong leadership, commercial discipline and consistently delivered against commitments".

A US-UK duel citizen, Lewis joined Halliburton in 1996 and most recently was a senior vice president and member of the Halliburton executive committee with responsibility since 2014 for leading its largest division, Completion & Production.

Prior to this he led the Europe/Sub-Saharan Africa Region and the Drilling & Evaluation division.

He joined Halliburton after nine years in academia, where he was NERC research fellow at the Royal School of Mines at Imperial College in London and Conoco Lecturer in Petroleum Geology at Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh.

Jon received his PhD in reservoir characterisation from the University of Reading in 1987.