Satya Nadella takes business size of top-10 India origin CEOs to $350 billion
New Delhi: With Satya Nadella becoming CEO at software giant Microsoft, 10 Indian origin persons holding top posts at global corporations manage businesses is worth about USD 350 billion.
Nadella, the Hyderabad-born cricket loving, engineering executive, who has been with Microsoft for over 20 years, has joined the league of Indra Nooyi, Lakshmi Mittal, Anshu Jain and Ivan Menzes, among many other Indian-origin persons at the helm at large conglomerates headquartered abroad.
There are many other Indians heading the businesses at relatively smaller companies abroad, specially in the IT sector, but at least 12 large companies have got India-born chief executives.
International magazine Time once termed CEOs as India’s leading "export" and said that the subcontinent could be "the ideal training ground for global bosses".
Interestingly, the total size of businesses managed by just 10 Indian-origin CEOs globally exceed the total exports from India, which stood at about USD 300 billion in the last fiscal and is estimated to be around USD 325 billion in the current fiscal ending next month.
The big conglomerations include Microsoft, PepsiCo, ArcelorMittal, Deutsche Bank, Diageo, Reckitt Benckiser (Rakesh Kapoor), MasterCard (Ajay Banga), DBS Group Holdings (Piyush Gupta), SanDisk (Sanjay Mehrotra), Global Foudries (Sanjay Jha) and Adobe (Shantanu Narayen).
Anshu Jain serves as co-CEO of Germany's Deutsche Bank, while Menezes last year took over as chief of UK-based liquor giant Diageo.
While Microsoft recorded turnover of over USD 78 billion last year, ArcelorMittal's annual revenue stood at USD 84 billion (down from over USD 93 billion in 2011 and over USD 100 billion a few years ago). Among large companies, PepsiCo commands USD 66 billion turnover, while Deutsche Bank has over USD 43 billion and Diageo over USD 18 billion.
Among non-promoter CEOs, Nadella now runs the largest company among those run by Indian origin persons.
In the past, giants like Citigroup, Vodafone and Motorola have also had Indian-origin CEOs.
According to human resource experts, professionals in India have become global professionals. The technical skills and the behavioural patterns of Indians executives make them very much adaptable to any kind of situation they come across.
Experts believe that Indians’ focus on good education and ability to work in difficult situations is aiding to this rising trend and more and more Indians could rise to top positions at global companies in the near future.
