35 Indian-origin CEOs run global giants with over $1 trillion reveune

From Sundar Pichai to Laxman Narasimhan of Starbucks, about three dozen Indian-origin CEOs now manage global businesses worth $1 trillion. While half of these companies belong to the IT sector, there are five companies each from healthcare and industrials.

The combined trailing 12 months revenues of 35 companies managed by Indian CEOs stood at $1.08 trillion at the end of December 2022. While the search engine giant Google accounts for more than a quarter of the aggregate revenue, Microsoft contributed another 19 percent to the total sales. The aggregate net profit of the sample stood at $182.4 billion at the end of 2022.

Alphabet, the multinational parent of Google, reported a revenue of $282.84 billion in 2022, the highest among the 35 companies managed by Indian origins. While Google top the list of revenues, Microsoft made it to the top in market capitalisation and net profit.

35 Indian-origin CEOs run global giants with over $1 trillion reveune

The sample together had a market capitalisation of $5 trillion, with 40 percent of it coming from Microsoft alone. That compares with the $3.03 trillion market capitalisation commanded by all listed companies back home.

With Vimal Kapur of Honeywell set to succeed Darius Adamczyk as Chief Executive Officer of the company, the list of companies controlled by Indian-origin persons has grown further to 35.

Similarly, after being named incoming CEO in September, Starbucks on Monday made an official announcement of onboarding Laxman Narasimhan as CEO of the company, nearly two weeks earlier than expected.

Apart from Microsoft and Alphabet, other companies that boast of over $100 billion market cap include IBM, Novartis, Honeywell, Starbucks and Adobe. Moreover, heads of these 35 companies together took home $631.3 million as total compensation for the year concluded, data compiled from Bloomberg showed.

Among the global companies, Rangarajan Raghuram of VMware and Satya Nadella of Microsoft drew the highest pay package of $58.07 million and $54.95 million, respectively, during the year, according to Bloomberg data.

In 2018, Vasant Narasimhan became the CEO of Novartis. In an exclusive interview with CNBC-TV18 last month, Vas Narasimhan said it was “amazing” to see so many people of Indian origin in top leadership positions.

The other CEOs on the list include Vivek Sankaran of Albertsons Cos, Arvind Krishna of IBM, Sanjay Mehrotra of Micron Tech, Shantanu Narayen of Adobe, Surendralal Lal Karsanbhai of Emerson Electric, Rangarajan Raghuram of VMware Inc and among others.