Sanjiv Mehta

Born in Kanpur, Mehta studied in Mumbai and Nagpur. He is a chartered accountant from the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India and later completed the Advanced Management Programme from the Harvard Business School.

He began his career in 1983 with Union Carbide. Early in his career, he was part of the crisis management team that worked on the Bhopal Gas tragedy in 1984. Since then, to date, he has been known to start most meetings by reviewing the safety agenda. In 1998, he joined the board of Unilever Bangladesh as its commercial director. In April 2002 he was appointed as the chairman and managing director of Unilever Bangladesh. Under his leadership, Unilever Bangladesh went on to become the crown jewel of Unilever's parent company given its competitive growth and stellar performance. In 2007, he moved to Manila as the chairman of Unilever Philippines, and in 2008 was appointed as the chairman of Unilever North Africa and Middle East (NAME). In 2013, he took over Unilever's business in India and South Asia, as Chairman and MD of Hindustan Unilever (HUL).

Under his leadership, in seven years HUL's market capitalisation increased from $17 billion to over $70 billion, making HUL the top five most valuable companies in India, as well as Asia's largest consumer staples company. HUL is now the second-largest Unilever business in the world.

With Sanjiv at the helm of the company, HUL has won several awards, including prestigious Economic Times' Company of the Year' & 'Corporate Citizen of the Year' awards, Business Standard's 'Company of the year' award and the Asian Centre for Corporate Governance and Sustainability's 'Best Governed Company'. Forbes has also rated HUL the 8th most innovative company in the world and the most innovative company in India. A global study by Aon Hewitt ranked HUL as the 3rd best Company globally for building leaders behind GE and IBM.

Mehta is a firm believer of "doing well by doing good". Under him HUL has taken on and expanded several initiatives that have societal and environmental impact. Through the Hindustan Unilever Foundation and its community partners, water potential of more than 1.3 trillion litres has been created by democratizing water management in villages across India. Further, under the Shakti program, over 136 thousand Shakti women entrepreneurs have been empowered in rural India. Other than that HUL's ongoing health and hygiene initiatives have impacted more than 154 million people all over the country.

In 2021, Sanjiv took over as the President of Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, India's largest and oldest apex business organizations.

Mehta grew up in Mumbai, and is the son of S. P. Mehta and Anita Mehta. His parents were displaced during the Partition of India. His father was a senior executive with the Reserve Bank of India.

He is married to Mona Mehta, who is also a chartered accountant. The couple have twin daughters, Naina and Roshni, who studied at Cornell, MIT, and Harvard, respectively.