Comments
Coca-Cola India on Friday announced key leadership changes effective October 1, just a day after Ahmet C. Bozer, Executive Vice-President and President Coca-Cola International, set new targets for the India operations. He had said that India, which was currently the seventh largest market, has the potential to become among its top five key markets till 2020.
In a bid to align itself with the 2020 goals and for a deeper focus on operations, the company said it will have two leaders to manage operations. At the same time, it has decided to bring the marketing and commercial roles under one head “for a deeper and combined focus on commercial and shopper marketing as well as product commercialisation,” the company said.
Sumanta Datta, who is currently Vice President, Customer and Commercial Leadership, will take over as Vice President, Company Bottling Operations. He will work closely with the team at Hindustan Coca-Cola to deliver the volume and profitability targets, the company said.
At the same time, Bhupendra Suri, who is currently Director-Franchise Operations, has been elevated as the Vice President-Franchise Bottling Operations. He will work with the 11 franchise bottlers in India.
The current Vice President-Operations, Vikas Chawla, is moving to Athens to take over as the Franchise Operations Head in South East Europe, leading operations for 12 European countries.
“He adds to the list of 47 managers that the business unit has exported to the global Coca-Cola Company system,” the company said.
The beverage major also said that Andriy Avramenko, who is currently Vice-President, Juice, will take over as Vice-President, Strategy and Still Beverages, while Debabrata Mukherjee who is currently Vice-President, Strategy and Still Beverages, will take on the role of Vice-President, Marketing and Commercial.
Anupama Ahluwalia, who is currently the V-P Marketing, will take up a short-term leadership assignment at Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages and will return to Coca-Cola India.
All these senior leaders will report to Venkatesh Kini, Deputy Business Unit President, India and South West Asia.
In a statement, Kini said, “As we move into the next phase of our journey in India, we have a solid foundation and the necessary momentum in our business. We now need to have the scale and resources to capture latent growth. Building our talent pipeline and developing people capability is one of our key pillars for success.” He said that the new senior level management will work closely with the bottling partners to achieve the Vision 2020 goals in India.
meenakshi.v@thehindu.co.in
Comments
COMMENT NOW
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.