Ashish Kathuria

As a part of Asia-Pac Commercial Excellence leadership team my role is to develop, maintain & nurture strategic long-term trusting relationships with our biggest customers in Asia to accomplish consumption growth, drive thought leadership, and agree on long-term objectives to create joint value.

• AS Watson & Dairy Farm group run their operations in 7 Asian countries, hence it is a multi geography, multi cultural & multi dimensional role where i align the category level initiatives, brand investments and WOW for each of the market.
• The role involves multifunctional engagement & collaboration with Supply Chain, Trade Marketing , Marketing & Shopper marketing teams to deliver OTIF, manage Innovation launches, ensure visible distribution and deliver consumption & GM growth for GSK
• This role also demands regular engagement with GM's in the markets to drive agreement on customer strategy deliver execution excellence
• For few countries these 2 customers contribute more that 50% to the total business hence performance in these customers have direct impact on the country/ market performance
• Its a £120 mio annual business with a 8% CAGR for last 4 years
• GSK is winning with these customers for last 4 years with category management partnerships leading to faster category growth & high consumption for GSK brands
• GSK Asia for the first time won an award for "Best of the Best Partner for Operational Excellence" in Asia level from AS Watson in 2020 for 219 performance

As Head of Trade marketing for Organized trade all spends in Modern Retail, CNC, CSD, CPC , B2B & E-commerce were planned, controlled and executed by my team

• I had 3 DR's who led different categories and also engagement with KAM's, CSD managers & Channel leads
• We managed the overall governance of all the activities in these channels and were responsible to deliver ROI on all the spends at all customers for GSK
• In the 2 years of my tenure Organized Trade business grew 2X of GSK growth in India at 16% annually , with a share gain in all top customers like Future Retail, ABRL, Reliance and Pharmacy Chains
• I was instrumental in setting up the new policy for Investments in C&C to avoid situations of channel conflicts, which included exclusive C&C packs, state wise C&C activation packs, stock cover for critical SKU's & TOT capping
• The team delivered efficiency back to back for 2 years with reduction in spends by 2% (21 crs), on a 1200 crs turnover

As part of this assignment with 3 DR's we did:

• Set up the Organized Pharmacy channel plan for GSK in India
• Apollo & Med-plus were the 2 Top customers and our JTBD was to convert a transactional relationship into a strategic long term joint partnership
• In International customers we had the same JTBD for Walmart, Metro & Auchan (Spar)
• From monthly promo calendars we moved these customers to quarterly & 6 monthly plans coupled with QBR's and annual T2T with the leadership ( SD's level)
• We also introduced the concept of Sales Implant at WM & Pharmacy chains to make sure we have the right assortment , stock levels & planogram at the customer point, this helped us to grow our Service level to 96%, and optimized the stock cover to 21 days from 30 days
• Average Sales growth was 21% in 2 years, largely coming from Pharmacy Channels, as CNC channel was under strict rationing due to channel conflicts