MAM
Castrol India appoints Saugata Basuray as managing director
Saugata Basuray, who has spent his entire career in the Castrol network, gets a five-year term as managing director from June
MUMBAI: Castrol India has stopped hedging. Saugata Basuray, who has been running the company in an interim capacity, was on Thursday handed the managing director’s role outright, with a five-year term beginning June 1, 2026.
The appointment ends the uncertainty that followed the abrupt departure of his predecessor and rewards a company lifer who knows the business inside out. Basuray has spent more than 26 years inside the Castrol network, cutting his teeth in sales and marketing before working his way through a string of leadership roles in India and abroad.
His career reads like a tour of the Castrol empire. He started as executive assistant to the managing director of Castrol India, moved to the company’s global headquarters in the UK in 2008, and helped build Castrol EDGE into a global power brand. Back in India, he ran the B2B sales business and headed marketing before being posted as managing director of Castrol Philippines from 2013 to 2017. A stint heading the company’s joint venture operations in Indonesia followed.
Most recently, as whole-time director and head of B2C business, Basuray overhauled the company’s go-to-market strategy and pushed Castrol’s distribution network deep into rural India, a bet that the next wave of growth lies beyond the big cities.
A Symbiosis Institute of Business Management alumnus with an engineering degree from the University of Pune, Basuray is very much a product of the system he now leads. Castrol India is not bringing in an outsider to shake things up. It is backing the man who already knows where all the levers are.
