US companies think global

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: The corner offices of corporate America are increasingly reflecting the global reach of companies.

Citigroup, the world’s largest bank, named Vikram S Pandit, a native of Nagpur, India, as its chief executive. Pandit joins 14 other foreign-born chiefs who are running Fortune 100 companies.

The head of the Altria Group was born in Egypt, for example. PepsiCo’s is from India, the Liberty Mutual Group’s is a native of Ireland, and Alcoa’s was born in Morocco.

Their numbers have jumped from roughly a decade ago; there were nine foreign-born chief executives on Fortune’s list of the 100 largest companies in 1996.

But the size of the new group does not reflect a noteworthy change—they come from more far-flung countries now than then, when they were more likely to hail from Canada or Europe.

The shift reflects, in part, the focus that companies place on foreign markets for growth. For the first time, for example, the companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index are expected to achieve more than half their sales from abroad next year. By contrast, six years ago, large American companies that disclosed their foreign earnings earned about a third of their revenue from foreign sales.

Many of these foreign-born chief executives were recruited by companies like General Electric and Procter & Gamble in the 1970s and 1980s for their overseas operations. Now they hold top positions at companies that also include Chiquita Brands International, the Eastman Kodak and the Kellogg. Chief executives at Dow Chemical, Altria and Alcoa started in foreign units of their companies.

“Even though they’re based in the US, companies are less and less thinking of themselves as American companies,” said Michael Useem, a management professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

“It’s just a numbers game,” said SP Kothari, deputy dean of the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s absolutely nothing wrong with the US, but our population here is only 300 million. Imagine 2 billion people from the outside start getting a decent education and going through the pipeline. Well, we are going to encounter more of them who rise to the top.”