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Shares in Sweden’s largest steelmaker SSAB Tuesday tumbled at the Stockholm exchange after it said that its chief executive officer Olof Faxander is stepping down. At the same time shares rose in engineering group Sandvik where Olof Faxander now will take the helm.

In Tuesday morning trading shares in SSAB, the world’s largest supplier of high-tensile steel, had lost almost one billion kronor ($143 million) in total stock market value, falling more than 2 percent. Meanwhile Sandvik, the world’s biggest maker of metal-cutting tools, was up 1.30 percent.

During his time at SSAB, 40-year-old Olof Faxander strengthened the company’s niche orientation and broadened its geographical focus. He pushed through one of the bigger acquisitions made by a Swedish company when bying pipe maker Ipsco for about 7.7 billion dollar.

“Olof has successfully managed the transformation of SSAB into a modern and increasingly global steel company. At the same time, the specialization towards quenched steels has been strongly developed,” SSAB’s Chairman Sverker Martin-Löf said in a statement.

Also Sandvik hailed Faxander for his "broad international experience from intensely competitive markets undergoing change and has proven ability to develop companies for increased value generation".

“Sandvik is a knowledge-based company and Olof Faxander will now have an important role to play in the company’s continued development”, Sandvik Chairman Anders Nyren said in the statement.

Martin Lindqvist was appointed as the new CEO of SSAB.