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Tag: Saurav Adhikari

  • Z shareholders back new board appointments

    Z shareholders back new board appointments

    MUMBAI: Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd. (Z) today announced that its shareholders have decisively approved the appointments of advertising professional  Divya Karani as an independent director and Saurav Adhikari as a non-executive director to the company’s board. The endorsement, secured through a remote e-voting postal ballot that concluded today, reflects strong shareholder confidence in the board’s ability to drive value creation and foster robust growth.

    The company’s strategic vision includes enhancing board guidance and strengthening its governance framework. The inclusion of highly experienced individuals from diverse sectors is central to this approach, a company press release states. Karani and adhikari are expected to provide comprehensive guidance to the management team, ensuring effective execution of the strategic growth plan.

    Karani brings over three decades of experience in the advertising and media sectors, notably as the chief executive of dentsu media, south Asia. Her insights are anticipated to be invaluable for advertising revenue. Adhikari, with more than 30 years of expertise in global technology, fast-moving consumer goods, and consumer durables, will contribute significantly from an operations and investment perspective. He is the founder and senior partner at Indus Tech Edge Fund I.

    Z chairman R. Gopalan expressed gratitude to shareholders, highlighting the “sharp business acumen” and “creative expertise” that the two directors will bring to the board. He reiterated  that they  will only strengthen “the  board’s directional guidance to the management team as the company progresses towards the targeted aspirations. We remain committed towards fortifying Z and maximizing shareholder value, through all our decisions.”

  • Zeel gets Saurav Adhikari on board as additional director; shareholders reject Punit Goenka’s reappointment as director

    Zeel gets Saurav Adhikari on board as additional director; shareholders reject Punit Goenka’s reappointment as director

    MUMBAI: The board of Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd (Zeel) today approved the appointment of former HCL and Pepsico India executive Saurav Adhikari as an additional director in the category of non-executive director. It informed the BSE about his addition to the company through a regulatory filing  in the evening of 28 November 2024. He had earlier been appointed on 15 November in the same capacity, but his term was valid only till 28 November, the date of the AGM.  

    Adhikari is currently the founder & senior partner at Indus Tech Edge Fund I, a growth fund focused on globalising India’s vibrant technology ecosystem. He is the former chairman of NASDAQ listed Vahanna Tech Edge Acquisition I Corp (a special purpose acquisition company (Spac)) and has after a successful DeSpac/merger moved on to the board of NASDAQ listed Roadzen.  He  also serves as a board member of Goodricke Group Ltd, Accelya Solutions India Ltd, (both listed in India), and Bridgeweave Ltd UK, an AI based fintech firm. He works as a technology advisor and investor with interests across AI based fintech and healthcare firms, as well as analytics, IoT and logistics firms. He serves as a senior advisor in the Shiv Nadar Foundation and is a board member of the Shiv Nadar University.  

    Adhikari has impeccable credentials. Especially while with the HCL group. He worked on several multi-billion-dollar inorganic investments in technology and software, carve-outs of multiple enterprise software product suites, joint ventures with global majors, all to transform and reinvent HCL’s business. He was instrumental in strategising HCL’s  pivoting of its business model to a leading intellectual property-led solutions company. In his technology role, he had built deep inroads into global private equity and VC firms, while creating large, successful, value-based partnerships between HCL and private equity owned technology businesses, which are considered groundbreaking in the industry.

    At HCL, he held various executive positions, the last being president, global strategy, working directly with the founder & chairman with oversight across the group’s business, as well as the not-for-profit Shiv Nadar Foundation. During this time, he contributed to HCL’s immense growth from a sub $200mn revenue company in 2000 to a $14bn revenue and over $50bn market cap today, transforming it into one of the world’s leading, and India’s third largest IT/technology firms and India’s no. 1 software product company.  

    His prior experience also includes several senior global leadership and executive roles across Unilever, as vice President at PepsiCo and Group SEB  (Tefal India) and as CEO of the India business. 

    Meanwhile, Punit Goenka’s reappointment as a director on  the Zeel board failed to get the requisite majority of votes (50.4 percent against: 49.5 percent for) from shareholders during the company’s AGM held yesterday, the company said in an exchange filing.  He,  had earlier stepped down as managing director and continued as CEO of the company recently. Media reports have viewed this failure to get reappointed as a director a set back for Goenka.  (Updated on 29 November 2024, 8 am)