Friday 26 / July / 2024
New Delhi: Soma Mondal, who became the first woman to head the Steel Authority of India (SAIL) in January 2021, has taken the 70th position in Forbes' 2023 list of the World's Most Powerful Women.
Other Indian women on the list are Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, HCL Technologies Chairperson Roshni Nadar Malhotra, and Biocon Chairperson Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw.
The SAIL Chief has led the steelmaker to record financial growth since taking over as the company's profits surged threefold to Rs120 billion in her first year at the helm.
Mondal first became a director for the company in 2017. She's responsible for launching an 80,000-million-rupee effort to expand SAIL production capacity.
She has more than three decades of experience in the metals industry. Before joining SAIL as a Director, Soma Mondal was the Director (Commercial) at NALCO. A graduate in Electrical Engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Rourkela in 1984, Mondal started her career as a Graduate Engineer Trainee at NALCO and rose to become Director (Commercial) at NALCO. She then joined SAIL in 2017 as the Director (Commercial) and subsequently has become the Chairman of SAIL.
At SAIL, she spearheaded the implementation of the marketing strategies emerging from the Comprehensive Turnaround Roadmap for the Company since 2017, which witnessed SAIL increasing its sales and expanding the market reach progressively year on year.
SAIL achieved best ever sales volume consecutively for the three Financial Years from 2017-18 to 2019-20, and the momentum is still continuing in the current financial year of 2020-21, despite the challenges posed by COVID-19.
Promoting the branding efforts of the various products of the Company, she was instrumental in the launch of new brands viz. “NEX” and “SAIL SeQR” to promote PF Structural Sections and TMT Bars respectively.
