Former Cabinet minister Lim Boon Heng has been appointed chairman of Temasek Holdings, replacing 75-year-old S Dhanabalan, who retires next month. Observers say any board and management changes that come along are all part of succession planning for the Singapore investment firm. SMU Associate Professor of Finance Annie Koh, said: “The chairman leads the long-term vision of a company, so if you look at this, it would be part of the succession planning. Mr Lim is actually around 65 years old right now. So if you take a 10-year horizon, it would be like he's still good for a 10-year life cycle for Temasek, and in that ten years, you're probably going to be encountering a number of very key decisions - the investment mandate, the investment policy statement, the critical leadership team that is needed to carry out the investment vision." She added: "Temasek in the last few years has been preparing itself for a team leadership platform, and someone will rise from that rank as someone accepted by the whole group of team players. So I think there's too much concentration on what will be the announced leader, who will it be. And I don't think we should use the same yardstick - that just because there's a lot of renewal in some of the Temasek-linked companies, it's inevitable that Temasek itself will be looking for a leadership change at the CEO level."