Last week, Tech Mahindra sought the government’s nod for the appointment of Mohit Joshi, a non resident Indian, who’s currently the company’s managing director, designate, as MD and CEO of the company from December 20. The companies have to seek clearance from the government as part of a routine regulatory process if the candidate is not an Indian citizen.
The development brings to light an interesting fact that a large number of CEOs of IT firms, who assumed responsibilities in the past 10 months, are based overseas, mainly in US or in Europe. Eleven new CEOs have assumed responsibilities of IT companies in the past 10 months, and as per their LinkedIn profiles, eight out of them are based outside India. This takes the total number of IT companies’ CEOs based overseas to 16.
Only three CEOs who were recently appointed – TCS’ K Krithivasan, apart from mid-tier companies’ CEOs like Karthikeyan Natarajan of Cyient Services and Vishal Salvi of Quickheal — are based in India.
In the largecap category, CEOs of four of the top seven Indian IT companies — HCLTech, Cognizant, Wipro and Tech Mahindra — are based outside India. A large majority of Cognizant’s workforce is based in India.
Location of Wipro’s CEO was in discussion a month ago after a shareholder in the annual general meeting, asked the chairman, Rishad Premji, about the possibility of relocation of Thierry Delaporte to another geography from his current location, Paris. Premji replied that Delaporte is strategically located in Europe and has easy access to both east (Asia) and west (America).
Even CEOs of other midcaps who have been working with their companies for quite a while, like Nitin Rakesh of Mphasis, Sandeep Kalra of Persistent Systems, Amit Chadha of LTTS, Sudhir Singh of Coforge, Samir Dhir of Sonata Software, and Manish Tandon of Zensar Technologies are based outside India.
Analysts say that these CEOs prefer to base themselves near their biggest markets, because a majority of their revenue comes from clients who are in US and Europe.