WHEN Diageo summoned Nik Jhangiani to steady the ship last July, the mood in the City was brittle. The maker of Johnnie Walker and Guinness had lost more than a fifth of its market value in a year. A profit warning still lingered in the air. US tariffs were biting. Investors wanted ballast.
They got an accountant who talks about pints.
At the Deutsche Bank dbAccess Global Consumer Conference in June 2025, Jhangiani opened with a confession. He had just poured his first Guinness. “It’s six steps,” he smiled, recalling how his son had warned him not to try it in front of investors because he has “terrible ways of controlling your facial expressions”. He needn’t have worried. The pint was “pretty amazing”. He even tasted Guinness 0.0 side by side with the original and admitted: “If someone wasn’t standing by me telling me what I should be kind of looking for in terms of the difference in the taste, I would not have known.”
It was a disarming vignette from a man whose career has been built on rigour. A Rutgers Business School graduate and New York–qualified certified public accountant, Jhangiani cut his teeth at Deloitte before rising through senior finance roles at Bristol Myers Squibb and Colgate-Palmolive.
Two decades inside the Coca-Cola system followed, culminating as the chief financial officer (CFO) of Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, the world’s largest independent Coca-Cola bottler by revenue. In between, he also served three years as group CFO of Indian telecom major Bharti Enterprises.
By the time he joined Diageo as chief financial officer in autumn 2024, he had spent more than 20 years as a CFO across four continents.
Nine months in, he told investors it had been “a long nine months”. He had been constantly on the road – from South Africa and Nigeria to Shanghai and Singapore – meeting customers and staff face to face. What struck him? “We truly have some of the world’s best brands… I’ve been blown away by the level of our marketing.” Yet he also sensed drift. Brand brilliance was not always matched by “physical availability and commercial execution”.
His answer was a programme with an urgent name: Accelerate.
Launched in May 2025, it targeted at least $500 million (£375m) in savings over three years, later raised to $625m, alongside a commitment to deliver around $3 billion of free cash flow in fiscal 2026. But Jhangiani bristles at the idea that this is mere cost-cutting. “It’s not Accelerate being seen as a cost savings and a cost-cutting programme. It’s Accelerate to allow us to invest where there’s growth.”
He dissects Diageo’s $3.6bn annual advertising and promotion spend with forensic clarity: roughly 40 per cent on media scale and reach; 20 per cent on development and “non-working”. Too fragmented, too duplicative. AI can help. He recounts how the boss of WPP showed him two adverts side by side – one costing “tens of millions”, the other created by AI. “I actually got it wrong in terms of which one was which.” For Jhangiani, technology is not a gimmick but a margin lever.
Trade spend, too, must earn its keep. “I’m not talking about reduction, it’s about optimisation,” he insists. He wants pay-for-performance, not “funny money that they just get to deduct and keep in their pockets”.
Behind the spreadsheets lies a philosophical shift. Diageo, he argues, has been overly fixated on margin percentage. “It’s about dollar profits,” he told analysts. An obsession with percentages risks distorting behaviour, steering the group away from attractive value pools. Ready-to-drink (RTD) cocktails are a case in point. Even with patchy strategic support, Smirnoff Ice “still stayed alive”. In an era of moderation and convenience, RTDs are both recruitment tool and growth engine.
Moderation is the question that keeps him awake. Are US spirits sales cyclically weak – or structurally threatened by cannabis, GLP-1 weight-loss drugs and Gen Z restraint? “It’s probably the biggest point in my mind that keeps me awake at night,” he admitted. So far, he sees little hard evidence of lasting damage to spirits. But he is mapping scenarios: zero-alcohol, lower ABV, smaller formats, premium “drinking better, not more”. The portfolio must flex with the consumer.
Meanwhile, the balance sheet looms. Net debt stood at $21.9bn at June 2025, leverage at 3.4x. Jhangiani has pledged to return to 2.5–3.0x “no later than 2028”, with divestments where assets no longer fit strategy or prove too capital-intensive. “I have not in any way strapped ourselves in,” he said. Value maximisation, not fire sales.
For a few frenetic months, he carried the chief executive title too, after Debra Crew’s sudden departure. In November 2025 the board appointed Sir Dave Lewis, former Tesco chief executive, as permanent CEO from January 2026, praising Jhangiani’s “excellent leadership as Interim CEO”.
In volatile markets, credibility is forged in moments of doubt. That moment came with Diageo’s 2025 annual results. Against a backdrop of industry-wide slowdown, tariff threats and a slump in the share price over the year, Jhangiani struck a tone of controlled resolve: “We have delivered what we said we would deliver,” he said, while acknowledging there was “a lot more work to do”. He moved quickly to calm fears over US tariffs, adding: “We believe we could largely mitigate about 50 per cent of that, and that is before any pricing actions.”
Investors, hungry for steadiness after months of uncertainty, sent the shares up nearly 7 per cent on the day – a tentative vote of confidence that the turnaround had a firmer hand on the tiller.
As Jhangiani resumed his CFO role at the start of 2026, investors have urged the company to keep him close. Reports noted that investors view Jhangiani as a stabilising force who possesses the deep beverage industry expertise necessary to complement Lewis.
He is not a marketer by training, nor a master distiller. His influence lies in something more prosaic and more potent: discipline. The willingness to question sacred cows, to reallocate capital, to insist that every dollar works harder.
And yet, he still talks about the theatre of a pint poured in six precise steps. In that blend of romance and rigour lies his authority.