MasterCard’s Banga is ranked at the fifth position.
By Sreejith Vallikunnu
Three Indian-origin CEOs, MasterCard’s Ajay Banga, Cognizant’s Francisco D’Souza and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, were listed among the top 50 global business leaders by Fortune magazine.
The U.S.-based footwear giant Nike’s Mark Parker topped the list as Fortune’s business person of the year.
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 the software giant Microsoft’s Nadella at the 47th spot.
Other business leaders 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.
“Under Banga, MasterCard has doubled profits and revenue in five years, and 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 Itaú Unibanco in Brazil. Shares are up 40% in the past two years as MasterCard swipes its way toward $10 billion in revenue,” the magazine observed.
Fortune describes D’Souza as Cognizant’s youthful (47) and dynamic chief. “Financial services is the company’s stalwart sector, but 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 with organic revenue growth (16% last year) and its biggest acquisition to date (a health care IT-services provider called TriZetto),” the report 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.