Shonali Chakravarty joins United Breweries as communications, sustainability and CSR leader

BENGALURU: Corporate communications leaders rarely announce a job change with quite this much self awareness, but Chakravarty’s move from deep tech to beer has earned it. She has joined United Breweries Limited, a HEINEKEN company, to lead communications, sustainability and CSR for the business in India, closing out a six year run at Lenovo where she headed enterprise communications across Asia Pacific. It is, by her own admission, a wildly different industry, and that is precisely the point.

The career arc leading up to this moment reads like a masterclass in navigating regulatory complexity. Chakravarty cut her teeth at Edelman working public affairs for clients including the US India Business Council, McGraw Hill and Starbucks, before moving through Marsh, Essar Oil and Essar Power, where she led strategic and digital communications. From there she joined Uber, rising from lead to head of policy communications for India and South Asia and eventually corporate and policy communications across the wider region, a role that would have handed her a front row seat to some of the most contentious regulatory battles in Indian tech history. A stint as director of corporate communications at OYO followed, before Lenovo recruited her in 2020 to head communications for its infrastructure solutions group across thirteen plus Asia Pacific markets, a mandate she expanded in 2024 to cover both the infrastructure and solutions and services groups.

The results at Lenovo were not merely reputational, they were recognised internally and externally. Chakravarty picked up the president’s spot award for innovative media campaigns and for kickstarting the company’s analyst relations programme, followed by individual excellence awards in consecutive years for improving share of voice and corporate reputation, and ultimately the Lenovo President’s Club, a distinction reserved for the company’s top 2 per cent. Exchange4media named her among the top 20 communications professionals to watch in 2025, hardly a surprise given that trajectory.

What makes the UBL move genuinely interesting is the scope of the new mandate rather than the industry switch alone. “It’s a very different industry from enterprise technology. And that is precisely what makes this move so exciting,” Chakravarty said. She described the alcoholic beverages sector as bringing a fascinating new layer of complexity, deeply regulated, highly state specific and shaped by an unusually broad stakeholder ecosystem, adding that at UBL the mandate goes well beyond communications. “Bringing communications, sustainability and CSR together creates an opportunity to think about reputation and responsible business as one connected agenda. From how a company communicates, to how it operates, creates impact and earns trust. That feels like the right kind of next chapter for me.”

She also offered a sharp observation on how the profession itself has evolved. “The most interesting leadership opportunities today aren’t necessarily defined by a bigger geography or a bigger team. They are defined by how closely the mandate sits to the business and how much responsibility leaders are given for shaping the organization beyond its narrative.” That framing explains why a move from an APAC remit at a global technology giant to a single-market enterprise role can genuinely represent a step up rather than sideways, and it is a lesson worth noting for communications professionals still measuring career progress purely by geography.

For UBL and HEINEKEN, the appointment brings a leader with genuine scar tissue from regulated, high-scrutiny industries, precisely the kind of experience alcoholic beverages in India demands given its patchwork of state-level regulation and politically sensitive stakeholder terrain. Chakravarty herself seems in on the joke of the transition. “There’s something delightfully unexpected about going from deep tech to beer,” she said. “Turns out, after years of talking about AI, cloud and the future of computing, I’m now thinking about another kind of cloud. The one above a perfectly poured pint.”