Marks & Spencer has officially kickstarted the process to replace CEO Steve Rowe, according to Sky News.

It is still unclear when exactly Rowe - who took the reins from Marc Bolland in 2016 - is stepping down, but the reports claim the company has hired headhunter MWM Consulting to advise chairman Archie Norman on the next stages of the process.

This comes as no surprise, given earlier reports, though Rowe, 54, also insisted recently that his turnaround is not yet done despite M&S upgrading its expectations for the year for the second time on the back of its half year results, which saw it swing from a hefty loss to pre-tax profits of £187m for the six months to October.

Nor will it be easy to replace Rowe, with the Millwall-supporting M&S lifer forming an unlikely partnership with the urbane Norman.

So the biggest question is not over the timing but who is most likely to fill his shoes. 

According to Sky, three key players in Rowe’s executive team are tipped for the top job – CFO, Eoin Tonge; and joint-COOs Katie Bickerstaffe, who oversees the clothing arm, and Stuart Machin, who has spearheaded the food business’s transformation strategy. All three are strong candidates, and each would bring a diversity of experience with its own benefits to the job.

Bickerstaffe, for instance, has been rising through the M&S ranks since joining from Dixons Carphone’s UK&I business, of which she was CEO, in a non-executive role in 2018. Also a former managing director of KwikSave and group operations and HR director of Somerfield, Bickerstaffe’s promotion to strategy and transformation director last year was followed by a further elevation this spring to the joint COO role.

That’s a clear indication of how highly she’s rated given the carnage caused to the GM business in the early stages of the pandemic. Yet under her direction, the revamped clothing and home business has been consistently narrowing losses (half-year revenues were only 1% down versus the year before despite the pandemic), while the well-known problems in its online clothing fulfilment centre in Castle Donington have finally been put to bed amid strong growth and further online expansion plans at its Bradford centre. 

If Bickerstaffe were to be selected, she would also become the first female CEO in the high street retailer’s 137-year history.

But in what feels like a two-horse race, the appointment of Machin to the other joint COO is every bit as strong. Machin has been credited with completely revitalising the food business in his three and a half years as Food MD – overseeing the store transformation programme, increasing the range, making the M&S Food brand more affordable, not to mention taking M&S online via its joint venture with Ocado and introducing new supply chain technology.

Machin is also very highly rated by Norman, having recruited the former Asda, Tesco and Sainsbury’s retail veteran to at Wesfarmers, where he was operations director at Australian supermarket chain Coles before being promoted to managing director of Target. While Machin left Target under a bit of a cloud, after an accounting scandal (of which he was unaware) happened on his watch, since returning to the UK his performance at M&S and his skills as a food retailer have more than vindicated Archer’s faith in him. In a recent interview with The Grocer Machin said he was “too busy to think” about succession and is focused on his current job – his “pride and joy”, as he called it. 

If neither is deemed up to the job by Norman, Tonge is also an intriguing choice. Since joining as CFO 18 months ago, the former Greencore CFO has been overseeing the strategy and transformation planning side vacated by Bickerstaffe - though it feels as though he’s some way down the pecking order given his lack of retail experience.

An M&S spokesman said the group has no formal succession process in place, so it might still be too early to put money on any of the potential candidates. Plus, Norman will also surely consider a list of external contenders when the time comes to make a decision, with Judith McKenna, another Norman acoltye, an outside contender despite her Walmart International role. 

But one thing is for certain – whoever takes the top job will face a tall order to keep the show going. Because the Norman-Rowe duo may have picked the business back up, but as M&S gears up to re-join the country’s biggest publicly-listed companies, the high street is still in turmoil, and investors will not be benevolent if it falls back down again.

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