PepsiCo gets a new CEO

Indian American corporate honcho Indra Nooyi — Fortune's 4th most powerful woman in American business for 2002 (8th in 2003), has been named the next CEO of US multinational PepsiCo.

Quick'afile: Indra Nooyi, B.S., M.B.A., M.P.P.M., Greenwich, Connecticut.
Born in Chennai, she graduated in science from the Madras Christian College. A student of the 11th Batch of MBA from IIM-C., she did her graduation in management from Yale University. Apart from work, she is an avid guitarist and loves rock ‘n’ roll.

Nooyi joined the $33 billion global convenient foods and beverages company in 1994 and has served as president and chief financial officer since 2001, when she was also named to PepsiCo's board of directors. She is the fifth CEO in PepsiCo's 41-year-old history. An alumna of the Indian Institute of Management IIM-Calcutta (IIM-C), she brings with her vast and unique skills to the job. Prior to joining the Purchase, New York-based company, she held senior management positions in Motorola and Asea Brown Boveri (ABB). She had started her career in 1980 with the Boston Consulting Group.

She has directed the company's global strategy for over a decade and was the primary architect of PepsiCo's restructuring, including the divestiture of its restaurants into the successful Yum brand. She was instrumental in the spin-off and public offering of company-owned bottling operations into anchor bottler Pepsi Bottling Group (PBG), acquiring Tropicana, and the merger with Quaker Oats that brought the Quaker and the sports drink Gatorade businesses to PepsiCo.

Nooyi is also a Successor Fellow at Yale Corporation and serves on the board of directors of several organizations, including Motorola, the International Rescue Committee, and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

In a related development: Following in the footsteps of Karnataka, Punjab and Arunachal Pradesh have also banned sale of coke and pepsi in and around government schools, colleges and hospitals.

[AP]: Sales of the two companies' drinks have been hit since the Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi said tests carried out on 57 samples of soft drinks made by Coca-Cola India and PepsiCo India contained pesticide residues that were 24 times higher than Indian standards.

The center said almost all soft drinks sold in India contain high levels of pesticides, but the focus was on Coca-Cola and PepsiCo because the two account for nearly 80 percent of India's $2 billion-plus soft drink market.

yoke:
Gatorade @UF || Nooyi @Columbia || YAN@C (Yet another controversy at Columbia!) || Pepsi @UF Alligator