Nachiket Deshpande emerges as top contender for LTIMindtree CEO

Nachiket Deshpande, COO, LTIMindtree

Nachiket Deshpande has emerged as the frontrunner for the chief executive officer (CEO) post at LTIMindtree, India’s sixth largest IT services company by revenue, people familiar with the development said.

He is tipped to succeed Debashis Chatterjee, the first CEO of the combined LTIMindtree after the merger in November 2022. At present, Deshpande serves as the company’s chief operating officer (COO).

While Chatterjee’s term is set to officially end at the end of 2025, he might hand over the reins a few quarter earlier and oversee the transition to a new CEO, sources said.

Prior to joining LTIMindtree and erstwhile L&T Infotech, Deshpande had been Chatterjee’s colleague at Cognizant for nearly two decades.

Responding to Moneycontrol’s emailed queries, an LTIMindtree spokesperson said, “We do not comment on rumours.”

This comes at a time when the country’s $245-billion IT industry is seeing top level churn across key listed companies. Recently, Wipro saw a change of guard when Thierry Delaporte stepped down to make way for Srinivas Pallia to take over the CEO role. Over the past one year, Tech Mahindra, Tata Consultancy Services and Genpact too announced change in CEOs.

Why Deshpande makes the cut

Deshpande is an IT industry veteran with over 28 years of experience, having worked at Cognizant and Tech Mahindra prior to joining L&T Infotech as the COO in 2018.

"He is rational, measured and has done a very good job since he joined L & T Infotech from Cognizant five years ago. He has established trust in the system and also enjoys the confidence of L & T chairman SNS (SN Subrahmanyan)," according to one of the sources cited above.

A second source who has worked with Deshpande said that he is a rare executive who has overseen billion-dollar worth portfolios as a vertical (industry) and horizontal (service line).

"He handled billion-dollar worth businesses in Financial Services, Infrastructure services and also oversaw geographies such as US and Europe in Cognizant. He is also very good in structuring complex deals," this person said.

The other favourite executive who is in the race to take over as CEO at LTIMindtree is Sudhir Chaturvedi, who is currently the president for markets and an executive board member at the company.

Chaturvedi has been instrumental in signing several recent deals making headlines including setting up a joint venture (JV) with Saudi Aramco’s IT services arm Global Digital with an initial investment of $12.3 million.

He was an Infosys veteran where he last served as a senior vice president and head of financial services- Americas, leading a $1-billion plus business unit. Prior to joining L&T Infotech, Chaturvedi was the COO of NIIT Technologies.

Top level exits

Deshpande will be taking over charge at a time when overall growth is slowing down for the sector thanks to a weak macro environment. LTIMindtree has also seen senior management attrition rise post-merger, with at least two dozen top executives leaving in the last year and a half, joining rivals tech companies.

According to media reports, in 2024 alone, around eight top executives have resigned. The most recent one being chief financial officer (CFO) Vinit Teredesai. He later joined Persistent Systems as the CFO in May.

When asked about the significant leadership churn in a recent interview with Moneycontrol, CEO Chatterjee had said, “We had a significant leadership bandwidth also available across the two organisations. That's why we are very confident that it actually creates more opportunities for some of the leaders in the system.”

“At this point of time, we are very well positioned and whatever leadership exits here and there, we can always tide over that and we can always get back,” he said.

Chatterjee had also added that “succession planning is a very routine part of risk management exercise for any company of our size. And beyond that, we should not read into anything.”