एचटी ग्रुप में शीर्ष पर कई बदलाव, पढ़िए सीईओ राजीव वर्मा का लेटर

Dear Colleagues, The financial year that’s just got over was special in many ways – however, leading the pack of achievements for the year was our performance on readership scores across our flagship brands – Hindustan, Hindustan Times and Mint. This has indeed given us momentum for coming years on  growing our readership as well as revenues even more strongly than the very commendable performance of FY 2010-11.

As we enter the new financial year poised to scale fresh heights, I’m pleased to announce some changes at the leadership team. Venky Venkatesh, who took over the leadership of Circulation Sales function some 4 years back, has been instrumental in increasing product sales and distribution across brands and locations. This not only helped us immensely in gaining readership but also stature and strength in key markets of Delhi and Mumbai. He now moves on to a more diverse role, a critical part of which would be to lead the ramp-up strategy of our Hyper-local offering, Shopper. Besides this, he would be responsible for the North & East operations. Ishu Bhalla and Fehmi Hussain will report into Venky.

Rajeev Beotra, a very passionate and energetic leader, who in his current role as National Head of Media Marketing, has not only provided stewardship in raising the bar on revenue growth but has been instrumental  in building a strong, aligned and confident space selling team. He will now move on to head the Circulation Sales function. In addition, he shall be responsible nationally for Classifieds Sales. The Classifieds set-up in Seal will now integrate with Ashok Tiwari, who has very ably spearheaded the Classifieds & Lives teams in Delhi. For this purpose Vanfana Vasudevan would be accountable to Ashok, while reporting into Rajeev Beotra for her overall role as head of Seal operations.

To begin with, while Rajeev Beotra starts focusing on and understanding his new responsibility domain, Venky Venkatesh will continue to represent the company on INS and ABC councils. As of now, Nitin Chaudhry and Amit Gupta in Media Marketing will functionally report into Benoy Roychowdhury.

Rajan Bhalla, who in his current role as Marketing Head, responsible for all our brands across Media and Education platforms (with the exception of Hindustan Times) will now additionally head the Magazines business which was separated out last year to bring focus and thrust to this high potential category. Raju Sarin will report into Rajan.

Vivek Gaur joined us in the Leadership team last year. In a short period of time, he made noticeable impact with his fresh perspective and out of the box thinking. He brought the performance of Magazines and Classifieds streams to a new high. His calling however at this time is to pursue leadership challenges on new ventures as an entrepreneur. We wish him very best as he moves on to take these up.

Please join me in wishing all these leaders a great stint in their new roles.

Rajiv Verma