Gopal Vittal is among the top leaders of the Indian telecom sector as the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Bharti Airtel. An alumnus from the prestigious Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Calcutta, Vittal leads the Rs 4.5 lakh market cap behemoth founded by billionaire tycoon Sunil Bharti Mittal. Through his long and decorated career, Vittal has worked for just two companies, Airtel and FMCG giant HUL, shifting multiple times.
After completing his schooling from Rishi Valley School in Andhra Pradesh, Vittal pursued graduation from Madras Christian College. Vittal earned an MBA from IIM in 1990 and joined HUL. The biggest highlight of his HUL stint was Project Bharat where he devised a strategy to penetrate rural India by incentivising people to try products of HUL.
At HUL, he rose from a fresher to holding leadership roles in a 16-year stint before Sunil Bharti Mittal brought him to Airtel to head marketing operations. Vittal transformed Airtel’s mass market strategy, quadrupling the company’s customer base to 122 million from 33 million. A big factor was his rapid expansion of the brand’s presence in smaller cities of India outside Tier-1 cities.
Vittal left after just 2 years to rejoin HUL after being persuaded by CEO Nitin Paranjpe. He was appointed head of home and personal care and was even offered a seat on the FMCG giant’s board. He turned around the HPC business of HUL to double the annual growth but left after four years to rejoin Sunil Mittal’s telecom giant. He began his second innings at Airtel in 2012 as the Director of Special Projects and International business strategy.
A year after rejoining Airtel, Vittal was announced as the multi-billion dollar company’s new CEO in 2013. Since then, he has been reappointed for two five year terms. Vittal was given the Airtel board’s nod to continue as MD for another period of 5 years from February 2023. Nearly 90 percent of the board voted in his favour, as per an Economic Times report. Vittal’s fixed pay package at Airtel is Rs 9.6 crore annually in 2022-23. This was a rise of Rs 50 lakh from his 2021-22 fixed pay of Rs 9.1 crore. His compensation also has a variable pay of Rs 6.2 crore.
