Suitcase CEO Nuno Matos quits hotel suite in favour of a place to call home

Nuno Matos apparently is finally moving out of a hotel room into some permanent digs. Picture: Jane Dempster

Nomad Nuno no more! ANZ’s suitcase CEO has finally found a house.

That’s the word from Nuno Matos’s big presentation to ANZ investors on Monday, at any rate.

There was, obviously, on Monday more important stuff on show for ANZ investors at Matos’ presentation on the bank’s future – less so for staff and customers, we suspect.

But when one of Margin Call’s colleagues popped a question about when Matos was going to pack his bags and leave his expensive suite at Melbourne’s Park Hyatt Hotel, he was almost happy to share the good news.

“Thank you so much for being so concerned with my whereabouts in Melbourne,” he said.

He wouldn’t say where – north or south of the river is the important question that dictates allegiance in Melbourne, as it is in many of Australia’s capital cities. But he’s moving out sometime this week, he said.

The other good news for ANZ shareholders is that he won’t be wasting any money on consultants during his reign. He hates them, he told analysts.

That must be news to former McKinsey partner Pedro Rodeia, who was last week appointed to leadership of the retail bank.

Insourcing consultants as executives to cut jobs is an improvement on paying McKinsey to rehash the same job-cutting report it delivered to the past five banks that hired it, we assume.

And, while these kind of anti-consultant promises never seem to last long past the first crisis, it’s always good to hear a CEO enter the building saying he hates the breed.

Except ... it McKinsey which delivered Matos the ANZ 2030 strategy?

Anyway, let’s not quibble. Matos hates wasting money on consultants. In much the same way he appears, on form, to hate wasting money on staff and customer service.

Fortescue gives green Brit plan the boot

There’s been another backdown on a big promise from Fortescue, this time in the UK where the company had been promising to help revitalise the country’s manufacturing sector by establishing a battery plant for its electric trucks.

Not so much anymore. That’s because, as Andrew Forrest told The Telegraph on the weekend, it’s cheaper to do stuff in China.

Rather than subsidiary Fortescue Zero manufacturing the battery plants and power systems for its fleet of green haul trucks at a factory near Oxford, the work is going to be sent to China.

That’s interesting timing, because this column asked Fortescue what was going to happen at Fortescue Zero only a few weeks ago, after the mining giant announced it had downgraded a contract with Swiss-German giant Liebherr and brought in China’s XCMG to supply half of the trucks needed for its Pilbara operations.

At the time we were assured Fortescue Zero would still be making the power systems for Liebherr’s trucks, and the pair would jointly sell them to the rest of the industry.

Now Fortescue Zero is only going to make the power packs for 10 to 20 test models and then hand over responsibility for manufacturing at scale to XCMG.

Andrew Forrest and former UK trade and business minister Kemi Badenoch in 2023 when Fortescue was promising to build a factory. Picture: Jenny Magee

It’s only two years ago that Fortescue Zero moved into its brand new facilities in Kidlington, describing the decision as a “major boost to jobs, manufacturing and green energy” in the UK.

The centre, the company said would eventually have “capacity to produce and test up to 500 prototype battery systems per year with a total production capacity of 50 MWh/annum”.

Nope, not anymore. Now Fortescue Zero will just be a research and development centre hub.

Mind you, a few weeks ago Fortescue also signed a deal with Chinese battery and carmaker BYD in an effort, we’re told, to find a partner to help solve some of the technical problems with using the high-intensity batteries needed in heavy haul trucks.

And BYD, it seems to Margin Call, sounds like exactly the kind of company which might come up with a novel solution. After all, the company is busy wrecking the technical lead that Elon Musk’s Tesla used to boast of in the car industry. If so, what use is Fortescue Zero?

So much so that we also asked Fortescue about persistent rumours that Fortescue Zero – on its fifth CEO in only 18 months – might get shut down completely.

We were assured that wasn’t the case. Like we were assured they’d still be doing the manufacturing.