Robert Makila Sambian (Ph.D, FCCA, CA), is the acting Chief Executive Officer of the Volta Aluminium Company Ltd (VALCO), driving business strategy while ensuring balanced resource allocation and efficient utilization of same towards achieving the Company’s strategic objectives. He is a Chartered Accountant with experience spanning over 15 years of which 12 years have been spent serving in corporate finance roles in the aluminium industry.
Dr Sambian joined VALCO under the Company’s Management Trainee Program during the period of his National Service in 2006 towards the end of which he received a scholarship from the Africagrowth Institute in South Africa to pursue a postgraduate study in Development Finance at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. While there he was assigned a Research Assistantship role where he worked on a number of projects on the investment climate in Africa and got involved in the quarterly publications of the South African Business Confidence Index (BCI) and became a co-author of a book on SMEs in Africa.
Prior to re-joining VALCO in January 2011, he had a brief stint as an Accountant at Grand Oak Limited, a subsidiary of Lexcel Group, Nigeria. At VALCO, he quickly established himself as a key member of the Management Team, recognized for his deep understanding of the business across multiple functional areas and its strategic positioning within the global aluminium industry. His ability to provide nuanced insights has been instrumental in shaping the company’s long-term strategy. In recent years, he has led VALCO’s Strategic and Business Planning Team, spearheading initiatives to enhance competitiveness and sustainability. Additionally, he heads the Market Intelligence Unit, ensuring data-driven decision-making in a rapidly evolving industry. He was chair of the Tender Review Committee as well as the Administrator of the Company’s in-house Pension Fund Schemes for many years. He designed and implemented VALCO’s Pension Fund Accounting and Reporting System, establishing a framework for transparency, compliance and efficient fund management, ensuring prudent financial stewardship and safeguarding employee retirement benefits.
He has attended a number of aluminium industry-relevant international conferences and has been keenly following and evaluating market basics and tendencies as well as associations between commodities and other macroeconomic indicators in the aluminium and allied raw materials industries, allowing the Company to optimize benefits from the highs and lows of the markets. He leverages this with financial analysis to help shape strategic discourse as well as manage price risks and costs as part of a Team for key contract negotiations and advocacy for key policy initiatives. He, for instance, helped build the socio-economic case that was instrumental in the Company’s engagement with the Government of Ghana over a near-industry-competitive power tariff for the Smelter which was granted in 2017. He also provided various inputs for the engagement of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Mines and Energy on the then (2018) Ghana Integrated Aluminium Development Corporation (GIADEC) bill, resulting in an enhanced outcome. Since the introduction of Dr Sambian’s price risk management initiatives in 2021, the Company has experienced significant performance improvements, achieving positive EBITDA for most of the past four years – a milestone that had eluded the Company for over a decade. A component of the price risk management initiative includes derivatives which yielded direct net gains of USD 8.9 million in 2022 and USD 1.8 million in 2024, mitigating market volatility and optimizing revenue for sustained profitability.
Dr Sambian is a Member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants Ghana (ICAG) and a Fellow of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), United Kingdom. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration with emphasis on Accounting (First Class Honours) from the University of Ghana Business School (UGBS), an MBA in Finance (Distinction) from Coventry University, UK, and a PhD in Finance, from De Montfort University, UK, graduating as the Faculty winner of the Doctoral College Award & Prize.