THIS IS THE THIRD EDITION of Fortune India Best CEOs that identifies and ranks the best corporate performers in India Inc.

The methodology takes into consideration quantitative as well as qualitative assessment of financial and strategic performance of India’s Best CEOs. It all starts with how the enterprise has performed financially. To do that, we extract data for the last four fiscals — FY21 to FY24 this time round — for all listed companies with the Registrar of Companies to identify their performance over the past three fiscals. A CEO’s performance can be judged by financial metrics, but there are many aspects which are not purely driven by numbers. To bring in the qualitative inputs, the quantitative findings were presented to a jury. The jury this year comprised of Cyril Shroff, managing partner, Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas & Co; Hemendra Kothari, non-executive chairman, DSP Investment Managers; M. Damodaran, former chairman, Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi); Prashant Jain, founder, 3P Investment Managers; Rajat Dhawan, managing partner, McKinsey & Co, and Vinod Rai, former Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India. Sanjiv Goenka, chairman, RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group, chaired the Jury.

In the quantitative study, we ran the numbers through a set of filters to eliminate non-performers.

First, we considered companies with net sales of ₹1,000 crore or higher. Any company that incurred a loss during any of the three fiscals was not included. For all private firms, the CEO had to be in place for the entire three-year period of the survey. In case of public sector undertakings, (PSUs) since CEOs usually have shorter stints, all CEOs who were at the helm for at least one year were considered. Companies that went public during the study period were not considered. Only companies with accounting periods for 12 months were considered. After applying all filters, a total of 345 companies qualified for the study, of which 50 were BFSI companies.

Fortune India EY Best CEOs

How We Did It

Of Hedgehogs And Foxes