Quiet achievers Gopal Vittal and Neville Noronha leave behind key lessons in partnership

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Two top business leaders who haven't been celebrated enough but whose achievements are part of business school curriculum, will soon relinquish their long-held jobs. A couple of months ago, Gopal Vittal announced that he would step down as CEO of Bharti Airtel at the end of 2025.

Recently, Neville Noronha has said he will move out of the corner office at Avenue Supermarts, where he built DMart into the country’s most successful supermarket chain, in January 2026. Both men are products of the renowned Hindustan Unilever (HUL) school of business leadership, having put in time at the FMCG major prior to being picked for their current jobs. That isn’t the only common thread that binds them.

Over the course of the 12 years that he headed Airtel, Vittal transformed the company, first by weathering the vagaries of a hypercompetitive market comprising a dozen telcos and then by ensuring survival in the face of the brutal price war unleashed by Reliance Jio. Airtel came through that ordeal stronger and sharper, as its current 20% higher average revenue per user (ARPU) than that of Jio shows. Also Read: Gopal Vittal at Airtel: A stint of multiple challenges, in charts Noronha, too, has been a super achiever.

In his 18 years at the helm, he steered DMart from a handful of stores to a 387-store powerhouse with a market cap of ₹2.3 trillion, a four-fold rise from 2017 when it was listed. Under them, their companies stuck to the basics, shunning the adventurism that spelt doom for many of their rivals. Noronha’s mantra “retail is detail" sums up the approach though the company’s strategy of owning most of its stores to keep operational costs low is more shrewd than that suggests.