Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man and chairman of the country’s largest private sector company, Reliance Industries, has been ranked the fifth-best CEO in the world by Harvard Business Review.
Ambani, the only Indian to feature among the top 50 CEOs, is in the same league as Steve Jobs of Apple, Yun Jong-Yong of Samsung Electronics, Alexey Miller of Russia’s Gazprom and John Chambers of Cisco Systems. For the ranking, HBR collected data on over 2,000 CEOs of 48 nationalities, from companies based in 33 countries.
Only two Chinese CEOs — China Mobile President Wang Jianzhou, ranked 41, and CNOOC President Fu Chengyu, ranked 42 — feature on the list.
Ambani is also ranked number two among the top 10 emerging market CEOs, with Miller at the top. K V Kamath of ICICI Bank is the other Indian in the list of top 10 emerging market CEOs. He is ranked number 9.
“Among the up-through-the-ranks leaders on our list are Yun Jong-Yong, who joined Samsung straight out of college and worked there for 30 years before becoming the CEO, and Mukesh Ambani, who joined RIL in 1981, when it was still a textile company run by his father. These CEOs may not be household names, but here’s an objective look at who delivered the top results over the long term,” Morten T Hansen, Herminia Ibarra and Urs Peyer, authors of the report said.
“To be sure, we had reliable and sufficient data. We excluded CEOs who had assumed their roles before 1995 or after 2007. We measured their financial performance through the last day of their tenure or September 30, 2009. All told, we ended up with 1,999 CEOs from 1,205 companies,” the report said.
Steve Jobs, ranked the best CEO, delivered a whopping 3,188 per cent return on shareholder value (after adjustment to make the figures comparable across sectors) or 34 per cent compounded annually, since he rejoined Apple as CEO in 1997, when the company was in dire straits. From then till this September, Apple’s market value increased by $150 billion.
Jobs was followed by Yun Jong-Yong, who ran South Korea’s Samsung Electronics from 1996 to 2008. “Yun is an example of a leader who has stayed out of the limelight. During his tenure, he capably transformed Samsung from a maker of memory chips and me-too products into an innovator selling digital products such as leading-edge cell phones,” the report added.
“On an average, the top 50 CEOs increased the wealth of their shareholders by $48.2 billion. These CEOs delivered a total shareholder return of 997 per cent during their time in office. That translates into a spectacular annual return of 32 per cent,” the report said.
While Ambani and Chambers were the only two on the top five to hold degrees in business administration, the top three CEOs did not hold an MBA. Many other celebrity CEOs also failed to make the cut, including Carlos Ghosn of Renault-Nissan, Sergio Marchionne of Fiat, John Mack of Morgan Stanley, Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric, Daniel Vasella of Novartis and Robert Iger of Walt Disney.
CEOs from US-based companies fill 19, or 38 per cent of the slots on the top 50 list. Only 1.5 per cent were women, and only 15 per cent of the CEOs worked for companies based in a country that was not their country of origin.
