Microsoft chief executive officer Satya Nadella, A.O. Smith CEO Ajita Rajendra and MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga are among the top business leaders globally recognized by Fortune as Fortune’s 50 Top Business Leaders Of 2016. The 50-person list stuck with the basics in ranking the top business leaders, Fortune wrote.
“It parses and ranks companies by 12- and 36-month increases in profits, revenues, and stock performance, and factors in return on capital and debt,” the publication wrote. Mark Zuckerburg of social networking giant Facebook has been ranked number 1 in the Fortune magazine’s top 50 business persons list for 2016, which evaluates corporate leaders’ business performance. At the 2nd position in the list was Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, followed by Ulta Beauty’s Mary Dillon, Alphabet CEO and Google co-founder Larry Page, and Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella.
Intuit CEO Brad Smith was ranked 6th among the top 50 business persons. The list was based upon the corporate heads’ ability to generate cold, hard cash for their companies. Look who else is on the list.
Nadella was the lone Indian American in the top 10 of Fortune’s 2016 list, coming in at No. 5. Since Nadella took charge in early 2014, Microsoft has been engineering a stunning turnaround, Fortune said. He has taken a company focused on personal computing but showing promise in its enterprise and cloud-computing businesses, and turned that equation on its head, it added.
Rajendra, the next Indian American ranked at No. 34, is the A.O. Smith CEO, who has been with the Milwaukee-based water heater maker for four years. “Rajendra has kept the company boiling hot, doubling profits and nearly tripling the company’s stock price with strong growth in North America and China,” Fortune wrote.
Banga came a close 40 on the list of top business leaders. Fortune called the Indian American head of MasterCard “one of the apostles of a post-cash world,” helping his company expand overseas. Additionally, the company has formed an alliance with PayPal for in-store purchases as well as buying a rival to PayPal’s Venmo peer-to-peer payment app, Fortune said.
HDFC Bank managing director Aditya Puri was ranked No. 36 on the list. Puri has led HDFC for two decades, growing the bank into the second largest in the country, with $5.6 billion, including $1.9 billion in profits last year.
