Press Interpreter

08/17/06--Between those who underline that she is a woman and those who mainly point out that she is Indian by birth, the appointment of Indra Nooyi at the head of PepsiCo did not go unnoticed. As announced by the firm through a press release on Monday, August 14th, she is to take up her duties as general manager as soon as October 1st. She will take the chair on the month of May 2007. Mrs Nooyi will then be at the head of the 61st company in the country, a group which makes a 33 billion dollar (26 billion euro) turnover.

Since 2001, Mrs Nooyi, 50, had been the financial director of PepsiCo. She succeeds Steve Reinemund, 58. The latter told about his wish to devote himself more to his family after having spent twenty-two years in the company, including five as a general manager. Under his leadership, PepsiCo initiated a diversification that proved more successful to it than to its great rival Coca-Cola. Pepsi bought back the Tropicana fruit juices, it amalgamated with Quaker Oats and launched into a range of diet drinks, bottled teas and sport connoted drinks like Gatorade.

Mrs Nooyi declared herself "honoured" to have been chosen by the board of directors. Thereby, she joins the group of ten women (out of 500) who run a company ranking among the 500 biggest companies in the country, to have won the Wealth prize.

Consequences of globalization

As significant as it is, her appointment is not for all representative of the fact that feminine presence in the high spheres of multinational companies has become commonplace. The progress is slow. In 2005, women were holding 16.4% of company manager jobs, a figure that had remained almost unchanged since 2002 (15.7%).

Among the "pioneers", one can number Patricia Woertz running the food group Archer Daniels Midland (a 35.9 billion dollar turnover), Meg Whitman in charge of eBay, Anne Mulcahy from Xerox, or even Brenda Barnes, a former employee at PepsiCo who got a lot talked about in 1998 as she retired from her position as general manager to go to North America and devote herself to her family. Rapidly Mrs Barnes went back to business and she is now general manager of Sara Lee.

Mrs Nooyi distinguishes herself by the fact that she was born and grew up in India. She passed her management diploma at the Indian economic institute in Calcutta and only came later to the United States. First proceeding on with her management studies at the University of Yale, she then worked for Motorola, before joining in the soft drink group in 1994.

Her appointment was announced when the soft drink manufacturers, PepsiCo as much as Coca-Cola, were worrying about seeing the campaign against their drinks develop in India. Since August 2nd, six Indian states have placed restrictions on the sales of Pepsi and Coke, as a continuation of a record asserting that both sodas hold a level of pesticides injurious to the population. As an answer to the proportion the incident took, both companies put their products through a test in an independent laboratory. The latter pointed out that the drinks were conform to the European Union directives.

For Indian-oriented interest groups in the United States, the appointment of Mrs Nooyi speaks for the consequences of globalization. A week ago they congratulated themselves on the choice of Srinandan Kasi, also coming from Madras, as the vice-president and the legal adviser of Associated Press.

Full article

By Corine Lesnes

--Translated by Muriel Bach

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