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Ivan Menezes

Ivan Menezes

WITH Ivan Menezes at the helm of the multinational beverage group Diageo, the world’s largest producers of spirits and beers are seemingly unstoppable.

Not even the ongoing coronavirus pandemic could stop the business in its tracks. In 2020, the group was among the leaders on London’s FTSE. Despite the FTSE clocking its worst year since the 2008 financial crisis, Diageo was one of the businesses which gave the biggest boost to the index.


With more than 200 outstanding brands (sold in 180 countries) under its belt, the drinks maker’s success is hardly surprising.

The portfolio – which includes Guinness, Baileys Irish Cream and Captain Morgan rum – continues to grow too. In August 2020, the company announced it had purchased Aviation American Gin, a brand partly owned by Hollywood actor Ryan Reynolds. The deal was estimated to be valued at $610 million (£441m). It is not the first A-list brand that the business has snapped up – they bought Casamigos tequila, which was co-founded by George Clooney, in 2017 for an estimated $1 billion fee.

In October 2020, the multinational beverage group purchased the UK’s Chase Distillery (an award-winning gin and vodka company, which uses potatoes grown in Herefordshire within its products) for an undisclosed sum. “We want to keep adding to the growth and margin profile of the business by acquiring fast growing brands with high margins at the premium end of the market … and we’re on the hunt for more. But it is about finding quality brands that we can see growing well over a decade,” Menezes says.

Diageo’s contributions to its customers cannot be ignored either. The brand launched a $100 million recovery fund for bars and pubs to support them to welcome back customers and recover following the Covid-19 pandemic. The company also pledged more than 10 million bottles of hand sanitiser to support frontline healthcare workers across more than 21 countries.

According to chief executive Menezes, the company was witnessing “sequential improvement” in organic net sales and operating profit for the first half of its 2021 fiscal year, compared to the second half of 2020.

“I remain very confident that the fundamentals of our business remain strong. If you look at China right now where things are pretty much back to normal, you will see our businesses are performing well there, people are socialising outside the home again,” Menezes has told CNBC last year. Boss of the business since 2013, Menezes has led significant growth and transformation at the brand. As well as growing the business financially, he has also led huge strides in Diageo’s inclusion and diversity work.

Under his leadership, Diageo has become one of the most inclusive and diverse companies in the world, as ranked by Refinitiv as the second company for inclusion and diversity. It has also been ranked by Equileap as the top company globally for gender equality and listed in the Bloomberg Gender Equality Index.

Menezes has stayed loyal to the business for more than two decades, having initially joined in 1997. He held various senior management positions with Guinness and then Diageo until 2004 (when he was appointed president of Diageo Venture Markets) and was president and CEO of Diageo North America for eight years. Prior to his career with Diageo, Menezes worked across a variety of sales, marketing and strategy roles for Whirlpool in Europe, Booz Allen & Hamilton in North America, and Nestlé in Asia.

Menezes was born in the Indian city of Pune in 1959. His father is a former chairman of India’s Railways Board, while his elder brother Victor is the former senior vice-chairman of investment bank Citigroup. His other sibling Michael is the vice-president at Canada’s Bank of Montreal. Menezes is married with two children.

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