Brands
Haleon names Kedar Lele president for India Subcontinent
MUMBAI: Haleon has handed the reins of its India Subcontinent business to Kedar Lele, appointing him president with effect from January 2026. The move signals a sharpened focus on growth, leadership depth and closer alignment with the company’s global ambitions.
Lele will also join the Haleon executive team, bringing India firmly into the heart of the company’s “Win as One” strategy. He succeeds Navneet Saluja, who retired in October 2025 after steering the business through a period of consolidation and transition.
With more than 25 years of experience spanning FMCG, advertising, digital innovation and automotive sectors, Lele arrives with a résumé that blends scale with strategy. He joins Haleon from Castrol India Ltd, where he served as managing director. Prior to that, he spent two decades at Hindustan Unilever Ltd, holding several senior leadership roles, including executive director for sales and customer development in South Asia and chairman and managing director of Unilever Bangladesh.
An alumnus of the Indian School of Business, where he earned an MBA in strategic marketing and operations, Lele also holds a postgraduate diploma in marketing communications from Mica. Beyond corporate leadership, he serves on the board of TVS Automobile Solutions and has previously been vice president of the Foreign Investors Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Bangladesh.
As president for the India Subcontinent, Lele will play a central role in driving Haleon’s ambition to reach one billion more consumers globally by 2030. He will also advance the company’s purpose of delivering better everyday health with humanity, with India positioned as a key growth engine in that journey.
Haleon India, formerly GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare, operates across oral care, digestive health, pain management, respiratory care and vitamin and mineral supplements. Its portfolio includes household names such as Sensodyne, Eno, Crocin, Iodex, Otrivin, Centrum, Ostocalcium, Parodontax and Polident.
With Lele at the helm, Haleon appears set to blend consumer insight with execution muscle, aiming to make everyday health a little more accessible, and a lot more human.
Brands
Estée Lauder to shed 10,000 jobs as new boss bets on digital shift
The cosmetics giant raises its profit outlook but stays silent on a possible merger with Spain’s Puig, as job cuts deepen and a three-year sales slump weighs on the turnaround
NEW YORK: Stéphane de La Faverie is not done cutting. Estée Lauder announced on Friday that it plans to eliminate as many as 3,000 additional jobs, taking its total redundancy programme to as many as 10,000 roles, up from a previous target of 7,000 announced a year ago. The company, which owns La Mer, The Ordinary, Tom Ford, and Aveda, employs roughly 57,000 people worldwide. The mathematics of what is now being contemplated is stark.
The fresh round of cuts is expected to generate a further $200 million in savings, bringing the total annual savings from the programme to as much as $1.2 billion before taxes. That money, De La Faverie has made clear, will be ploughed back into the turnaround.
A CEO in a hurry
De La Faverie, who took the helm in January 2025, inherited a company that had endured three consecutive years of annual sales declines. His response has been to move fast and cut deep. A significant portion of the latest redundancies reflects his push to reduce headcount at US department stores, long a cornerstone of Estée Lauder’s distribution model but now a channel in structural decline. In their place, he is accelerating the shift toward faster-growing online platforms, including Amazon.com and TikTok Shop, a pivot that is reshaping not just where Estée Lauder sells but how it thinks about its customers.
The numbers are moving in the right direction
Despite the pain, there are signs the medicine is working. Estée Lauder raised its profit outlook for the remainder of the fiscal year, guiding for adjusted earnings per share in the range of $2.35 to $2.45, above analyst estimates and a notable step up from the $2.05 to $2.25 range it had guided for in February. Organic net sales growth is expected to come in at 3 per cent, the company said, at the high end of the range it set out in February.
The share price tells a mixed story. After De La Faverie took charge, the stock surged nearly 60 per cent, buoyed by investor optimism that a longtime company insider could finally arrest the decline. But 2026 has been rougher: the shares have fallen 27 per cent this year, weighed down by disappointing February results and the overhang of unresolved merger talks with Spanish beauty giant Puig Brands SA. The company gave no additional details about those discussions on Friday, leaving the market to guess.
Silence on Puig
The proposed tie-up with Puig remains the most consequential unknown hanging over Estée Lauder. A deal with the Barcelona-based group, which owns brands including Carolina Herrera and Rabanne, would reshape the global luxury beauty landscape. But with nothing new to say and a turnaround still very much in progress, De La Faverie is asking investors to trust the process.
Three years of sales declines, 10,000 job cuts, and a merger that may or may not happen. At Estée Lauder, the overhaul has barely started.
