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Sandeep Lakhina takes the reigns from Manish Porwal

Lakhina is a management professional with more than 16 years of cross-functional experience

The Starcom MediaVest Group has hired Sandeep Lakhina to replace Manish Porwal as managing director, India, West and South, Starcom Worldwide. Porwal is serving his last week at the agency. As managing director, Lakhina will lead the network’s operations in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Chennai and work actively with the group’s 10 specialist solutions units.

Ravi Kiran, CEO, South Asia, Starcom MediaVest Group, says, “At SMG, we are beginning to write a new chapter in our growth and evolution and hope to transform our business model Asiawide over the next three years. We were looking for a leader for our West/South region who would take over from Porwal and help steer our organisation to that desired future. We are really happy that Lakhina, with a powerful cross-functional and cross-geography experience and demonstrated capability of handling teams of diverse talent, has joined us.”

Sandeep Lakhina takes the reigns from Manish Porwal
Sandeep Lakhina
Lakhina says, “Apart from the so very obvious and omnipresent India growth story, the ever evolving media landscape and the opportunities and challenges therein motivated me to join the media space in India. Starcom’s strong reputation in the marketplace, coupled with the fact that it truly believes in, as opposed to merely paying lip service to, “adding value to its clients” and its stated “people first” approach were two of the three strong reasons in my decision to join the team. As the new media landscape intersperses itself with the so-called traditional media and unfolds itself upon us, I know that there is a strong opportunity to consolidate, evolve, innovate and champion the growth in this space. Given that this is a people’s business, and the strongest assets that we have are people, I believe it is our people who will help shape the growth of Starcom over the next few years.”

At Starcom Worldwide, Lakhina will oversee the work of Nikhil Rangnekar, executive director, India, West; Sindhuja Rai, general manager and head, Bangalore; Narendra Kumar Alambara, general manager and head, Chennai; and Dinesh Singh Rathore, general manager, India, FutureWorks.

Prior to joining Starcom, Lakhina headed the Indian operations for a UK based digital marketing company, where he worked for just about six months. With experience of more than 16 years overall, he has done stints in sales, marketing, business strategy, supply chain, process reengineering, business consulting and digital marketing.

He started his career in 1992 at a small setup in apparel trade, and he was there for two and a half years. He has worked with Zenith Computers in the sales function. He has also done a stint in advertising – at Euro RSCG in 1996; he was looking after client servicing and account planning at the agency till the beginning of 1999. He has also held a marketing position at Ebony Retail.

Lakhina has worked in the US for eight years – with Deloitte Consulting and Coca-Cola. At Deloitte, he was looking after strategy and operations practice. At Coca-Cola, he led global initiatives on strategy and operational effectiveness across the company and the bottling system.

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