There is something revealing about the way Aasif Malbari, 51, approaches achievement. Despite reaching the top job at one of India’s best-known consumer companies, Godrej Consumer Products (GCPL), his instinct is not to dwell on the destination. “Miles to go together before we sleep!” he wrote in a recent LinkedIn post — a line that captures both his relentless focus on the road ahead and his instinct to make the journey a collective experience.
That combination could define Malbari’s leadership at GCPL, where he took over as managing director and CEO on Wednesday, succeeding Sudhir Sitapati. The company, whose portfolio includes household names such as GoodKnight, Cinthol, Godrej No. 1 and Hit, has handed its top operating role to a leader who has spent nearly three decades moving across finance, strategy and business operations.
GCPL eyes growth across key global markets
His appointment also comes at an important juncture for GCPL. The company is pursuing growth across India, Indonesia, Africa, the US and West Asia, while continuing to invest in new categories and brands. Its latest reported results for the June quarter showed consolidated revenue growth, with the business focused on combining expansion with profitability and execution discipline.
For Malbari, the transition from CFO to CEO in just three years is therefore both a personal progression and a signal about what GCPL values in its next leader.
Malbari said he is “excited” to get started in his new role. “Our fantastic team and I are committed to meeting the board’s expectations,” Malbari said on Tuesday when the company announced the leadership rejig. The emphasis on the team is revealing. Malbari’s career began with an unusually strong grounding in numbers. A Chartered Accountant and Company Secretary, he secured the All India First Rank in both the CA Intermediate and Final examinations and graduated from Sydenham College, University of Mumbai. But his career has been less about remaining within the traditional boundaries of finance and more about using finance as a lens to understand business.
His nearly 18-year stint with Hindustan Unilever (HUL) gave him a broad grounding in the machinery of a large FMCG company. His responsibilities spanned financial controllership, category finance, treasury, investor relations, buying, planning, logistics and supply-chain finance. He eventually rose to become group controller, gaining a view that extended well beyond balance sheets and quarterly numbers.
In 2018, Malbari moved to Tata Motors, adding a different operating environment to his experience. His assignments included finance and performance management, before he moved closer to the passenger vehicle and electric mobility businesses. He became CFO of Tata Passenger Electric Mobility and a director at Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles, working through a period of restructuring, expansion and capital raising.
Malbari is credited with playing an important role in the reorganisation of Tata Motors’ passenger vehicle businesses and the $1-billion fundraising for its electric vehicle company. The experience mattered because it exposed him to decisions where finance was not simply about reporting performance, but about shaping strategy, allocating capital and building businesses for the next phase of growth.
Path to the CEO role
He returned to FMCG in 2023, joining GCPL as CFO. What followed was a relatively rapid broadening of his remit. From finance, his responsibilities expanded into strategy and business performance and then into the company’s international operations. As global CFO, he was closely involved with GCPL’s businesses across markets, including Africa, where the company has been building its FMCG portfolio alongside its established hair fashion business.
That evolution helps explain why his elevation to CEO is more than a conventional finance-to-chief-executive transition. Over three years at GCPL, Malbari has moved progressively closer to the operating engine of the company. His experience in improving financial performance, including helping drive higher Ebitda margins in the Africa business and earning recognition for business excellence, has been accompanied by increasing exposure to commercial and strategic decisions.
His razor-sharp focus on outcomes is matched by a clear preference for collective ownership. The phrase “together” in his LinkedIn sign-off is telling: the numbers may have been his professional starting point, but the next phase will require winning through people, markets and execution.
Malbari now has the opportunity to put three decades of experience across HUL, Tata Motors and GCPL to work from the other side of the table — not simply measuring performance, but setting the pace for it. And if his own words are any indication, he sees the appointment less as an arrival than as the beginning of another long journey.