Although men continue to dominate board rooms and c-suites globally, with female chief executives accounting for just 8.1% of Fortune 500 companies leadership, these women have broken through the barriers and lead their companies to exceptional success, showcasing their brilliance beyond a shadow of doubt.
Lisa Su
Credit: Lisa Su
Lisa Su is a Taiwanese American who is the CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) since 2014. She was born in Taiwan and emigrated to US at the age of 3 with her parents. She attended one of the most prestigious universities around the globe, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), majoring in electrical engineering.
Before joining AMD, Su worked at Texas Instruments and IBM. In 2012, she joined AMD as Senior Vice President and General Manager, overseeing the company’s global business units. She played a very important role in helping the company to diversify beyond the PC Market. In October 2014, she was appointed the President and CEO of the company.
Since her appointment, Su has helped the company achieve exponential growth and transformational change, with the company growing almost 70-fold in 8 years of her tenure.
Lisa Su
Nooyi is an Indian American, who spent a significant part of her early life in her native country. She moved to US in 1978, at the age of 23, when she was admitted into Yale School of Management for her MBA. After graduating, she spent 6 years working as a consultant for Boston Consulting Group (BCG). She also worked for Motorola and Asea Brown Boveri, before joining PepsiCo as Senior Vice President of corporate strategy and development.
Nooyi would go on to spend almost a quarter of a century working at PepsiCo, including a 12-year tenure as CEO, succeeding Steven Reinemund in 2006. She became the first female Chief Executive in PepsiCo’s history and was one of the only 11 female chief executives of Fortune 500 companies at the time of her appointment.
In her tenure, PepsiCo’s revenues almost doubled from USD 35 billion to USD 63.5 billion in 2017. She retired the following year and would go on to join Amazon’s board in 2019.
Anna Fang
Credit: Photo courtesy of ZhenFund
Fang is the CEO of China’s largest angel fund, ZhenFund, and was ranked number 1 by Forbes in its Midas Seed List and number 12 in Forbes’ Top Tech Investors’ list.
After completing her MBA from Stanford in 2010, she started her career with investment banking at J.P Morgan and later went to work for General Electric in product development. However, she was soon approached by a Stanford classmate to help launch ZhenFund for renowned Chinese investor Xiaoping Xu.
Despite humble beginnings, ZhenFund has grown exponentially after backing several unicorns. The fund’s size has grown to exceed USD 1 billion from USD 30 million in 2011.
Lorraine Belo-Cincochan
Since taking the reins from her father at the Philippines based Wilcon Depot, Cincochan has taken the company public in 2017, in one of the most aggressive expansion drives in company history.
Her father started the company in 1977 with one shop. Today the company’s market capitalization exceeds USD 2 billion and it has expanded to 43 outlets.
Han Seong-sook
Han Seong-sook took the helm of South Korean search engine Naver in 2017. Her appointment was a monumental feat in itself in a country where only 2.6% of CEOs are women.
Under her leadership, Naver has diversified and launched mobile-payment and music-streaming services. The company’s market capitalization has expanded from USD 24 billion to USD 31 billion.