PAKISTAN-BORN Salman Amin was appointed CEO of grocery multinational pladis Global in late 2019, and had less than a year there under his belt before the pandemic and lockdown hit the economy and supply chain.

Covid-19, however, left this graduate of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management unfazed, and pladis has seen its brands go from strength to strength during the two-year emergency: it merely underlined Amin’s reputation as one of the most talented and capable brand experts around.

He is also one of the very few Asian-origin CEOs in the UK, although their numbers are growing steadily, as the GG2 Power List demonstrates with each passing year.

Amin’s particular talent is perhaps entwined with his life journey, which took several turns on the route to where he is today – at pladis’s new headquarters in Chiswick, where it relocated from Hayes last summer.

Salman’s first home was Lahore, where his family lived and where he began his ascent.

“I was 17 years old,” he says. “I just finished my A-levels in Pakistan at the time and it was sort of expected that if I did reasonably well, it made sense to go abroad to study. So I went on to university in the United States, really to study engineering.”

So far, so straight-forward. Salman completed his degree and looked set on a conventional path – he was working in the field, or under the field to be more exact, wearing hi-vis vest and hard hat. “I was in Chicago, initially, literally down a hole with a giant boring machine in these tunnels under the city. And then, for me, there was a fork in the road: did I want to continue and do a master’s degree in engineering, or did I want to try something very different and broader?”