Lundin: When it’s time to put your name on the door

Stockholm, 15 May 2014. At the annual Lundin Petroleum shareholder meeting, CEO Ashley Heppenstall reported on the company’s impressive results. With an SEK 42 (around $6.4) billion market capitalization, Lundin Petroleum had become Europe’s second largest independent upstream company 13 years after its inception. As Heppenstall put it, “every krona invested in late 2001 is worth over 40 krona today.” Attending the meeting were the founder’s sons, Ian and Lukas Lundin. They had joined their father’s entrepreneurial activities in 1984 and together developed the Lundin Group of Companies, which, by the end of 2013, comprised 12 publicly traded companies in the natural resource sector. Lukas led the mining businesses as chairman of Lundin Mining’s operations and Ian looked after the oil and gas activities as chairman of Lundin Petroleum. Together, they steered a group, which by 2014 had a market capitalization of over US$13 billion and had operated in over 35 countries all over the world, including some complex jurisdictions, such as Sudan and Libya. The business had come a long way since the early days and over time the brothers managed to leverage the founder’s reputation as a charismatic, visionary and adventurous entrepreneur to take the organization to the next level. They built a substantial corporate structure, developing the group’s producing companies into “solid mid-tiers and beyond.” A set of strategically focused exploration companies led to a worldwide portfolio of new oil fields in addition to copper, gold and diamond mines as well as uranium and iodine mines. Over the years, the Lundins built their reputation in an informal way, letting their achievements speak their own language to the closely knit, sensitive investor community. They discussed the best way to transition from an entrepreneurial first generation business to a more sustainable intergenerational family business, while still maintaining Adolf Lundin’s entrepreneurial spirit.