Rajeev Bakshi to be Pepsi chief after P M Sinha
New Delhi: The quest is finally over. Mr Rajeev Bakshi, the present managing director, Cadbury South Africa and former head of Cadbury India, is expected to step into the shoed of Mr P M Sinha, chairman of Pepsico India, who has expressed his desire to retire in March next year.

The keenly-awaited succession plan was announced on Thursday in London to the Pepsi India brass by Pepsico International president Peter Thompson.
Those present in the meeting included Pepsico India chief P M Sinha, marketing chief Vibha Rishi, chief financial officer Rahul Bhatnagar and technical head Vikram Tandon.
Bakshi is expected to join Pepsico on July 1, 2001 and will be sent to the US on an orientation programme for three months. Thereafter he will return to India and overlap functions with Sinha until the latter retires on March 31 next year.
Bakshi has been with Cadbury for more than ten years. For eight years the VP for marketing and sales for Cadbury India he was sent to the parent company’s headquarters in London for a stint he returned as managing director of Cadbury India.
In February 2001 Bakshi was moved to South Africa as managing director and Matthew Cadbury, son of Adrian Cadbury, chairman of the board of Cadbury Schweppes, succeeded him here.
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Star in revamp mode, trims depts
Mumbai—Star TV is in a major revamp and trimming mode. Hence it is merging departments and reducing the number of administrative heads from the original 10 to the current six.
The major change includes the appointment of Samir Nair, executive vice president, who will now head both programming and marketing. Nair earlier headed the programming portfolio labelled 'content and communication'.
Peter Mukherjea managing director Star TV India, while justifying the merger of the marketing and programming departments under Samir Nair, said the logical corollary to programme selection was deciding how it will be marketed and how much budget to put behind billboards and promotions.
Earlier, the marketing department headed by Vikram Nair reported directly to the CEO, Mukherjea.
Similarly, the two advertising sales departments —for the Star Plus channel and the other that markets all the other channels — have been merged into a single ad sales network under another executive vice president, Sumantaru Dutta.
Dutta also heads Star’s recently created radio division, but given the separate nature of the business vis-a-vis television broadcasting, Star has appointed John Catlett as CEO of the radio division.
Meanwhile, Jagdish Kumar, earlier executive VP-corporate and legal affairs, has taken charge as chief operating officer of 'Digital Platforms' - a relatively new division covering DTH and cable networks. Kumar now reports to Star’s Hong Kong-based president of Digital Platforms Group Altaf Ali Mohammed.
Thus portfolios have been vacated by Jagdish Kumar to be merged with those handled by CFO and Executive VP, Shankar Narayan. In addition to finance, Narayan now holds legal, HR, adminstration and broadcasting.
The two executive VPs whose portfolios have not been disturbed are Raj Nayak and Arun Mohan. Nayak continues as head of sales and Mohan as head honcho of distribution.
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