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Piush Kothari joins Croma as chief customer experience officer
The veteran strategy executive brings a formidable digital and P&L pedigree to India’s most trusted consumer electronics retailer
MUMBAI: Croma, the Tata-backed consumer electronics chain, appointed Piush Kothari as its chief customer experience officer, the company announced this month. Kothari, who most recently served as executive vice-president and head of subscriptions and media at JioHotstar, joins with a mandate to put customers at the centre of everything Croma does, from the moment they walk into a store, physical or digital, through the entirety of the ownership experience.
“Croma has been a trusted name in consumer electronics for millions of Indians,” Kothari said on joining. “I’m looking forward to working with Shibashish and the incredible team at Croma where we want to keep raising the bar by keeping customers at the centre of what we do.”
It is a significant hire. Kothari brings nearly two decades of cross-industry experience spanning strategy, digital, and P&L roles at some of India’s most consequential organisations. At JioHotstar, where he spent a year and five months, he oversaw SVOD revenues, subscribers, and the media centre of excellence. Before that, at The Walt Disney Company, where he spent five years and seven months, he led product, growth, partnerships and international expansion for Disney+ Hotstar, scaling its subscription business across India and running standalone operations in Singapore, Canada and the United Kingdom. He also served as a nominee director on the board of Mashal Sports, the entity behind Pro Kabaddi League, where he helped clinch a five-year broadcasting and streaming media rights deal and steered the league through its post-Covid comeback season.
His earlier career is equally eclectic. At Aditya Birla Group, Kothari straddled the chairman’s office and the payments bank, where he helped launch the bank’s UPI consumer app and drove the acquisition of over a million customers in four months at industry-leading cost. Monthly UPI transaction processing crossed Rs 1 billion in just the second month of launch, a remarkable feat in 2018. Before that, stints at Accenture Strategy, Shell and Welspun rounded out a career that has taken him from oil and gas boardrooms to fintech war rooms.
Educated at IIM Calcutta and St. Xavier’s College, Calcutta, Kothari is the kind of executive who has seen enough corporate theatre to know what actually moves the needle.
At Croma, the needle he needs to move is customer experience, and if his track record is anything to go by, it is in very capable hands.
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Google nears Nvidia in race for world’s most valuable company
Market cap gap narrows as Google hits $4.65 trillion, Nvidia at $4.86 trillion.
MUMBAI: In the AI gold rush, even the giants are sprinting and Google is suddenly gaining ground. Google is rapidly closing in on Nvidia in the race to become the world’s most valuable publicly listed company, with the gap between the two narrowing sharply amid diverging stock momentum. The tech giant’s market capitalisation has surged to around $4.65 trillion, following a more than 140 per cent rise in its share price over the past year.
That rally has added over $2.6 trillion in value in just 12 months, including nearly $900 billion since January alone. Its stock recently hovered at $381.80, slipping marginally by 0.04 per cent, but still reflecting strong upward momentum.
Nvidia, meanwhile, continues to hold the top spot with a valuation of approximately $4.86 trillion. The chipmaker crossed the $5 trillion milestone in October last year and peaked at $5.27 trillion on 27 April. However, its shares have largely plateaued over the past six months, rising just 0.2 per cent recently to $199.99.
The contrast in trajectories is striking. While Nvidia has seen relatively flat movement, Google has gained over 36 per cent in the same six-month period. Barron’s estimates suggest that if current trends hold, the valuation gap could shrink to as little as $190 million by the time Nvidia reports its first-quarter earnings on 20 May.
Daily momentum paints a similar picture. Nvidia recorded average daily gains of about 0.66 per cent last month, compared to Google’s stronger 1.42 per cent, an edge that could prove decisive in the short term.
Driving Google’s resurgence is its aggressive push into artificial intelligence across its ecosystem, from search and YouTube to cloud computing. The company has already invested $144 billion in capital expenditure over the past two years and plans to deploy a further $490 billion over the next two.
Its cloud division is also gathering pace. Google Cloud reported an order backlog of nearly $220 billion in the latest quarter, with total backlog touching a record $462 billion, around half of which is expected to be realised within two years. The company’s entry into chip sales is also beginning to factor into its growth narrative.
The last time Google briefly topped the S&P 500 by market value was in February 2016, when it edged past Apple for just two days. This time, the stakes and the numbers are far higher.
At the heart of the contest lies a single force: artificial intelligence. As both companies pour billions into infrastructure, chips and platforms, the leaderboard is no longer just about size, it is about who can scale the future faster.
