NEW YORK – Three Indo-American CEOs, including Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and MasterCard’s Ajay Banga, have been named among the top 50 global business leaders by Fortune magazine, a list that is topped by Nike’s Mike Parker.
While global payment solutions provider MasterCard’s Banga is ranked at the fifth position, Cognizant’s chief Francisco D’Souza has been ranked 16th followed by software giant Microsoft’s Nadella at the 47th spot.
Other people on the list includes Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg at the second place, followed by Electronic Arts’ CEO Andrew Wilson (3), Apple’s Tim Cook (4), Ulta Beauty’s Mary Dillon (6), Xiaomi’s Lei Jun (7), Uber’s Travis Kalanick (8), Chipotle’s Steve Ells and Montgomery Moran (9) and Biogen’s George Scangos (10). All of them are Chief Executive Officers.
About Banga, the magazine said that under him, MasterCard has doubled profits and revenue in five years. Besides, he has been aggressively acquiring companies to build its technological edge.
“This year, Banga signed a 10-year deal that locks in almost all Citi cards as MasterCards and a similar 20-year deal with Itau Unibanco in Brazil. Shares are up 40 per cent in the past two years as MasterCard swipes its way toward USD 10 billion in revenue,” it noted.
Fortune said D’Souza has kept Cognizant on the “cutting edge” not only with digital services, analytics and cloud services but also by expanding its health care segment and its biggest acquisition to date of health care IT-services provider called TriZetto.
“The son of an Indian diplomat, he taught himself programming in high school, joined Cognizant in 1994, and has been CEO since 2007,” it said.
The rankings are based on ten metrics including financial results — which formed the backbone of the analysis — along with stock performance and total shareholder returns over the same periods and factored in each’s ratio of debt to capital, Fortune said.
According to the magazine, Nadella faces the unpleasant task of grappling with the slow decline of the company’s once impregnable bulwarks as he tackles the challenge of shifting from a world-centered around the PC and purchased software to a universe of mobile devices and streamed (or even free) software.
“But Nadella is rising to the task. Microsoft’s Surface tablet/PC passed USD 1 billion in annual sales, can be seen on the sidelines in NFL games, and feels like a bona fide offering (as opposed to an embarrassing me-too like the Zune),” it added.
Others in the list include Alphabet’s Larry Page (11), Starbucks’ CEO Howard Schultz (12) and Alibaba’s Chairman Jack Ma (25).
Commenting on the list, Fortune said it as an assemblage of superstars who navigated the inevitable turmoil this year and led their companies to stellar and concrete results.
