India's COO Moment: Why Operational Excellence Has Become India Inc.'s Most Urgent Strategic Priority

In the summer of 2024, a senior executive at one of India's largest engineering conglomerates made a comment that stopped the room at a Gladwin International leadership roundtable in Mumbai. 'Five years ago,' he said, 'we hired COOs to keep the lights on. Today, we hire them to build the engine.' That shift in framing — from maintenance to creation, from execution to architecture — captures something profound about the moment India's manufacturing and industrial sector finds itself in.

India is in the middle of the most significant industrial transformation in its post-liberalisation history. The combination of Production Linked Incentive schemes disbursing over ₹4 lakh crore in incentives across fourteen sectors, a Make in India 2.0 push targeting a manufacturing share of GDP above 25% by 2030, and a global supply chain realignment that is redirecting capacity away from China — all of these forces are converging on a single operational question: who is going to build and run the factories, supply chains, logistics networks and operational systems that will deliver India's industrial ambitions?

The answer, increasingly, is a new generation of Chief Operating Officers who combine the hard-edged operational discipline of a factory manager with the strategic vision of a business architect and the data fluency of a digital native. These executives are rare, they are expensive, and they are the subject of some of the most intense executive search activity that Gladwin International has seen in its history of advising India's boards.

The Scale of India's Manufacturing Moment

The numbers that frame India's manufacturing opportunity are genuinely staggering. India's merchandise exports crossed $450 billion in FY2023–24, according to the Ministry of Commerce, with engineering goods, electronics, pharmaceuticals and chemicals accounting for the largest shares. The PLI scheme, launched in phases from 2020, has already attracted declared investments of over ₹1.97 lakh crore and generated incremental production of approximately ₹8 lakh crore, per the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade's 2024 annual report.

In the electronics sector alone, Apple's supply chain deepening in India — with Tata Electronics, Foxconn and Pegatron expanding their Tamil Nadu and Karnataka operations — has created a new benchmark for operational sophistication in Indian manufacturing. Tata Steel's integration of its UK and Indian operations following the British Steel restructuring, Larsen & Toubro's execution of gigantic infrastructure projects across the Middle East and India, Mahindra's transformation of its EV supply chain, and Bajaj Auto's global export push from its Chakan and Pantnagar plants — these are the operational stories that define India's industrial ambitions.

Each of these stories has a COO at its centre. And each of them illustrates a different dimension of what operational excellence means in the Indian context in 2025.

What Indian COOs Are Actually Being Asked to Do

The traditional COO role in Indian manufacturing was largely defined by three responsibilities: plant operations, supply chain management, and quality control. In the largest conglomerates, a fourth responsibility — labour relations — consumed significant time and political capital. These remain important, but they are no longer sufficient to describe what India's most progressive boards are demanding from their chief operating officers.

Gladwin International's analysis of COO mandates at large Indian industrial companies between January 2023 and December 2024 reveals six priority themes that consistently appear in the briefs we receive from chairmen and promoter families:

Capacity expansion at speed. With PLI incentives tied to investment and production milestones, boards are asking COOs to build greenfield and brownfield capacity faster than the market expects. This requires programme management skills at a scale and complexity that most Indian organisations have not previously demanded from their operations leaders.

Supply chain resilience and China-plus-one execution. India's manufacturers are simultaneously trying to win business from global customers who are diversifying away from China, and managing their own supplier bases through a China-plus-one lens. The COO is the executive who must make both sides of that equation work.

Cost competitiveness at global benchmarks. India's manufacturing cost advantage over China has narrowed as wages have risen in both markets and as India's infrastructure costs remain higher than those of comparable East Asian manufacturers. COOs are being asked to close the gap through operational efficiency, automation investment and procurement excellence.

Sustainability and ESG compliance. European and US customers are imposing increasingly stringent supply chain sustainability requirements on their Indian suppliers. COOs must now manage carbon footprints, water consumption, waste streams and social compliance — topics that were barely on the radar for most Indian manufacturing leaders five years ago.

Digital transformation of core operations. The deployment of Industry 4.0 technologies — IoT sensors, manufacturing execution systems, AI-powered quality control, digital twins — is moving from pilot to mainstream in leading Indian manufacturers. The COO must lead this transformation while keeping existing operations running.

Talent development and operational culture. India's manufacturing sector faces a skills gap that is as acute as any in the economy. COOs are being asked to build the training infrastructure, supervisory capability and operational culture that can sustain performance as organisations scale rapidly.

"The COO brief we are writing today looks nothing like the one we would have written in 2018. The person we are searching for needs to be operationally unimpeachable, digitally literate, commercially aware and personally credible with global customers. That profile was always rare. It is now extremely rare in India." — Gladwin International Managing Partner, speaking at the India Manufacturing Leadership Forum, February 2025.

The PLI Effect on COO Demand

No single policy intervention has done more to elevate the strategic importance of the COO in Indian manufacturing than the Production Linked Incentive scheme. Across its fourteen sectors — mobile manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, automobiles and auto components, advanced chemistry cell batteries, textile products, food processing, telecom and networking products, white goods, speciality steel, solar modules, ACC batteries, and drones — the PLI scheme has created a massive pipeline of investment commitments that need to be converted into operational reality.

The operational demands of PLI compliance are formidable. Companies must meet investment thresholds, production targets and in many cases incremental sales benchmarks within specified timelines to unlock incentives. The tolerance for operational delay or underperformance is close to zero. A company that misses a PLI milestone does not merely forgo an incentive — it signals to the market and to its customers that its operational execution is unreliable.

This has created an entirely new dimension of urgency around COO hiring. Boards that previously tolerated long tenures in their operations leadership — comfortable with executives who had grown up in the organisation over twenty or thirty years — are now asking whether their incumbent COO has the project management capability, the supply chain sophistication and the digital tools fluency to deliver PLI-compliant capacity expansion on time.

In a significant number of cases, the honest answer is that they do not. And that recognition is driving a wave of COO transitions across Indian manufacturing that Gladwin International is actively working on with our clients.

The Succession Question: COO to CEO

One dimension of the COO role that is receiving increasing attention from Indian boards is its relationship to CEO succession. In the US and European markets, the COO title has historically been associated with CEO succession planning — the COO as crown prince, being prepared to ascend. In India, the pattern has been less consistent. Many large Indian conglomerates have a tradition of family members or IIM/IIT alumni in their topmost roles, with professional managers filling operational positions below the chairman and managing director.

That pattern is changing. Several prominent Indian conglomerates — including those in the Tata, Mahindra and Bajaj families — have demonstrated their willingness to elevate professional managers to CEO and MD roles when the operational track record warrants it. The COO who can demonstrate consistent delivery of complex operational mandates, develop genuine commercial relationships with customers, and articulate a strategic vision for the business is now a credible CEO succession candidate in a way that was less common a decade ago.

For executive search firms like Gladwin International, this creates an interesting dynamic. We are increasingly asked not just to find a COO who can operate the business as it is, but to find one who can grow into the CEO of the business as it should be. The assessment of that growth potential — the distinction between a superb executor and a genuine enterprise leader — is one of the most challenging evaluative tasks in our practice.

The Talent Market for COO-Level Executives in India

India's market for COO-level talent in manufacturing and industrial sectors is characterised by genuine scarcity at the top. Gladwin International's proprietary data shows that for searches at the COO or equivalent level (President Operations, Head of Manufacturing, Chief Supply Chain Officer) at large Indian industrial companies, the qualified candidate universe — executives who combine the required operational depth with the strategic capability that boards now demand — rarely exceeds fifteen to twenty names nationally.

Compensation has moved sharply in response to this scarcity. A COO at a large-cap Indian manufacturer — Tata Steel, L&T, Mahindra & Mahindra, JSW Steel — typically earns between ₹4 crore and ₹8 crore in total annual compensation, including long-term incentive plans and performance bonuses. At rapidly scaling PLI-beneficiary companies in electronics or specialty chemicals, we are seeing total packages exceed ₹5 crore for executives with the right combination of global manufacturing experience and India operational track record.

The most sought-after profile in current searches is an executive who has operated in a world-class manufacturing environment — ideally with exposure to Japanese or Korean operational systems, or to the rigours of Tier-1 automotive supply — and who has returned to or remained in India with the ambition to lead a scaling operation. These executives command significant premiums, and the competition for them from global multinationals expanding in India, from private equity-backed industrials, and from the established conglomerates is intense.

Building the Next Generation

India's COO talent market faces a structural challenge that will not be resolved by any single hiring cycle: the pipeline of executives with the right combination of skills is not being replenished fast enough. India's engineering colleges produce hundreds of thousands of graduates, but the pathway from campus to COO is long, unpredictable, and not systematically supported.

The companies that will win the talent war for operations leadership over the next decade are those that invest now in deliberate development of COO-calibre talent. This means creating meaningful rotational assignments that expose high-potential operations managers to multiple functions and geographies. It means providing exposure to global operational benchmarks — through international assignments, through partnerships with world-class suppliers, through participation in global industry forums. And it means giving promising operators the strategic education — in commercial management, financial literacy and organisational leadership — that will allow them to grow beyond their functional expertise.

The COO role in India is at an inflection point. The organisations that recognise this — that understand they are not just hiring an operations manager but are appointing one of the key architects of their competitive position — will be the ones that capture the enormous opportunity that India's industrial moment presents. Those that continue to treat the role as a functional slot to be filled will find themselves outpaced by competitors who grasped its strategic significance first.