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Nooyi, three others on Fortune List

si Team
Saturday, October 26, 2002
si Team
Indian-born Indra Nooyi, the president and CFO of PepsiCo, is ranked No. 4 in Fortune's 50 most powerful women in America. She is instrumental in strategizing the policies and the marketing plans for PepsiCo and directly involved with every major strategic decision taken by CEO Steve Reinemund. While Lalit Gupte, managing director and COO of ICICI, is positioned 44, Naina Lal Kidwai, vice chairman and managing director of the HSBC Group's investment banking division in India, is ranked 47 by the magazine. Vidya Chabbria, of the Jumbo group, also figures on the list.

In 1998, when everyone thought that acquisition was risky for Pepsi, Nooyi took the lead in acquiring 'Tropicana" and also played a key role in starting the company's fast food chains in 1997. "My goal is to make sure that we are constantly renewing ourselves and when you're 10 million dollars ,it's easy to grow at 10 per cent. We are $22 billion, which means we have to have $2 billion revenue every year", she says. Indra started with Boston Consulting Group in 1980 and after serving the organization for six years, she moved to Motorola as the vice-president (corporate strategy & planning).

Gupte has played a leading role in transforming ICICI, once a plodding development bank, into India's most widely diversified financial institution. With assets of $16 billion, it is the country's second-largest bank and the first Indian company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Kidwai joined the HSBC Group from JM Morgan Stanley, where she was Vice Chairman and Head of their investment banking business. Fortune said when Morgan Stanley hired Kidwai as head of investment banking in 1994, she became one of India's highest-paid executives. But the past year hasn't been easy: Silicon Valley's flu has given India's IT sector a bad cold, and privatization of state-owned industry, another Kidwai specialty, has hit a wall. Still, she remains a key player in the economic modernization of the world's largest democracy. Kidwai, an MBA from Harvard Business School, has over 20 years of experience in banking and investment banking, with ANZ Grindlays Bank, Morgan Stanley and subsequently with HSBC.

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