After quitting Viacom18, Sudhanshu Vats has joined Essel Propack as the MD and CEO effective from today, 16 April. The board has also appointed him as the additional director of the company. He has also been designated as key managerial personnel pursuant to the Companies Act 2013.
Headquartered in Mumbai, Essel Propack is a specialty packaging manufacturer of laminated plastic tubes for the FMCG and Pharma space.
Vats has more than 28 years of industry experience across FMCG and media sectors. Before Essel Propack, Vats spent eight years in Viacom18 as the MD and Group CEO, where he expanded the network from six to 54 channels across 80 countries. He added three more lines of business and grew revenue by over 4x by building a strong portfolio of direct to consumer digital offerings under the VOOT brand and strengthening data science and analytics capability.
Prior to joining Viacom18, Vats spent more than 20 years at Unilever in various sales and marketing and general management roles. He left Unilever as the head of Unilever’s laundry business in South Asia and head of the Radiant brand globally. He made Radiant the fastest growing laundry brand in the world with over Euro 500 mm turnover. During his long tenure at Unilever, he shaped many popular household brands, most notably Lipton, Vim, Wheel, Surf, Rin, Lifebuoy and Lux.
Vats is also the chairman of the National Media and Entertainment Committee of CII (Confederation of Indian Industry), vice president of IBF (Indian Broadcasting Foundation) and director at BARC (Broadcast Audience Research Council). He is also on the advisory board of a number of NGOs.
Vats holds an M.B.A. from Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad. He received his Bachelor of Technology degree in Mechanical Engineering from National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra.
