She survived a copper bust. Now she’s CEO for the boom.

Quirk, 60, became chief executive of $74 billion Freeport-McMoRan last month, ascending to the top spot after a 35-year career at the Phoenix-based company, where she served as chief financial officer and in tax and corporate-development roles. 

She and her predecessor, Richard Adkerson, began crafting a copper-focused strategy for Freeport in the early 2000s, when China emerged as a big consumer and the pair realized the supply of the metal wouldn’t be enough to satisfy global demand.

With the company’s share price up 21% this year, Freeport is profiting from the global push for electrification. But to get to this moment, Quirk has had to navigate dealings with an activist investor, a foreign government and her own board.

Facing off against the boss

In 2012, when Quirk was CFO, Freeport was doing well and expanding under the leadership of Adkerson and then-Chairman James “Jim Bob" Moffett, a former oil wildcatter who in the 1980s led the discovery of Freeport’s Grasberg copper and gold deposits in Indonesia.

The company was generating cash and needed somewhere to spend it. At Moffett’s behest, the board proposed investing in oil and gas businesses.

Quirk and Adkerson advised against it, cautioning that investors would likely punish any deviation from the focus on copper. They were ignored, and the backlash to the oil-and-gas plan was immediate: Shares tumbled and investors condemned the company for changing its strategy and taking on debt. Freeport spent some $9 billion on acquisitions it later had to undo.

Then, in 2015, copper and oil prices collapsed. By 2016, Freeport’s market value had fallen to just $4 billion while its debt had ballooned to some $20 billion. It took the company years to dig itself out.

“It was a tough, tough situation to be in," Quirk said, calling it a “very difficult time" in her career. Adkerson was deciding whether to stay on as CEO, and Quirk was getting calls of her own for other CFO opportunities.

She stayed put, calling it a test of loyalty.

“I just felt a big responsibility to our people and I didn’t want to leave them at a time when strong leadership was needed," she said. “At any given time all the cards could have fallen down, but I didn’t give serious thought to leaving. I really wanted to find my way through."

Encountering outsiders

In 2015, the company was racing to stabilize in the wake of a steep drop in energy prices, pledging to cut capital spending and jobs and scale back production. Then Carl Icahn showed up.

The famed activist investor revealed a more than 8% stake in August of that year, and later got two independent seats on the board. Icahn and his representatives on the board encouraged spending cuts and were involved in ousting Moffett, the investor said in a recent interview.

Both Quirk and Icahn say they had a good working relationship, though their methods sometimes differed. One example: when Freeport needed to negotiate an agreement with the Indonesian government over the company’s mining rights. Indonesia was barring exports at times, which was preventing the company from selling gold and copper it had mined. The parties were working on a framework to resolve the outstanding issues.

The Icahn side proposed undertaking a public-relations campaign against Indonesia, an idea that Quirk and others nixed.

Some of their playbook didn’t necessarily work with a country like Indonesia, Quirk said. “Sometimes the patience level that we need to exercise as a management team with a long-term view is different than a patience level of an activist investor."

Freeport asked the Icahn side not to interfere with Indonesia, and the team agreed to respect company executives’ wishes.

One-way tickets to Jakarta

The negotiations with Indonesia over Freeport’s mining rights spanned years and were crucial for Freeport, given the outsize role Grasberg plays in supplying the world’s copper.

Since 1991, Freeport had been operating on a 30-year contract that allowed two 10-year extensions. The government wanted Freeport to adopt a new licensing regime, and also wanted to own 51% of the project, up from 10% at the time.

Freeport thought it had the right to mine until 2041, but the government stipulated 2021. The company could have gone to arbitration but decided against it because it wanted to work with the government, Quirk said.

There were stops and starts, Quirk said, and it took time for Freeport to get comfortable with the new licensing regime and be confident it could protect its long-term investments.

The discussions were so numerous and intense that Quirk would buy one-way tickets to Jakarta, where many government ministries were involved in the deliberations.

Ultimately a deal got done at the end of 2018, under which the government got a 51% stake and Freeport’s local subsidiary 49%. Freeport also pledged to build a smelter, which extracts metal from ore.

“It worked out, but there were times of real concern given the situation," Quirk said, adding that the government did a “great job."

Freeport is once again in discussions with the government, this time about extending its mining rights beyond 2041.