Naval shipbuilder Austal’s founder and biggest individual shareholder, John Rothwell, is stepping down as chairman after 37 years.
Mr Rothwell, 80, will remain on the Austal board as a non-executive director but be succeeded as chair by former US Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer, a one-time aviator with the US Marines.
The West Australian businessman owns a 9 per cent stake in the company valued at $80.6 million at Austal’s share price on Thursday.
He has headed Austal since 1987, building it into an ASX-listed, international defence contractor with a multibillion-dollar orderbook, 4000 employees and substantial ship building operations at Henderson and in the US and South East Asia.
Austal started out building crayboats and passenger catamarans before graduating to increasingly bigger contracts for other commercial vessels and then patrol boats, culminating in its first deal to build warships for the US Navy in 2004.
The company saw an opening for an innovative shipbuilder using aluminium to create faster, lightweight and affordable ships for the US Navy, but to seize the opportunity, the vessels had to be built in the US because of the country’s strict security laws.
Austal went looking for a US partner, settling on a small commercial shipyard on the Mobile River in Alabama and then won the US Navy over.
“What they were asking for was a ship that hadn’t been built by any of those shipyards before,” Mr Rothwell recalled in 2015.
“The American defence are very good at exploiting developments that are done overseas. They bring them home to them one way or another.”
More to come