MUMBAI: India yesterday celebrated the appointment of Satya Nadella as the new chief executive of Microsoft, seeing it as another endorsement of home-grown talent that has risen to the top of the US corporate world.
Nadella, who became the giant company’s third CEO on Tuesday, was born and grew up in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad and studied at Mangalore University before moving to America to further his studies and career.
“India makes a power point,” said a proud front-page headline of the Times of India newspaper about the 46-year-old cricket lover’s appointment.
“India has clearly emerged as the talent machine that is consistently churning out global CEOs,” said the daily.
Nadella, who has spent nearly half his life working for the technology titan, follows a string of Indian-origin business leaders who have made it to prestigious chief executive positions.
They include Indra Nooyi at PepsiCo and Ajay Banga at Mastercard, while Vikram Pandit ran Citibank until late 2012. Further afield, Anshu Jain is currently head of German banking giant Deutsche Bank.
Vibhor Singhal, an executive at brokerage PhillipCapital India, said a key reason for the success of India-origin executives was the “openness of the US economy in terms of accepting and allowing talent from outside to rise to the top”.
Proficiency in the English language “also gives Indians an edge over the competition,” said Vikram Dhawan, director at financial research firm Equentis.
The South Asian nation produces about a million engineering graduates a year and has earned a reputation for its booming IT outsourcing business, thanks to its large educated workforce and low labour costs. But many bright, middle-class youngsters leave the country due to a lack of well-paid jobs and difficulty getting places at Indian Institutes of Technology.
The Firstpost online news portal suggested that rather than celebrate Nadella, India should question why so many talented figures flower overseas instead of on home soil where family connections are often as important as qualifications.
Indian-origin families have thrived in the United States.
A 2012 report from the US think tank Pew Research Centre showed the median annual income for Indian Americans was $88,000, much higher than the Asian American average of $66,000 and the overall US household median of $49,800. Among Indian Americans aged 25 and older, 70 percent had obtained at least a bachelor’s degree, far higher than the national 28 percent.
AFP
