Arun Gupta Quits Shoppers Stop, Joins Cipla

Arun Gupta, often referred to as ‘the first among the equals’ by his peers in the CIO community, has quit as the Group CTO of Shoppers Stop. Gupta has joined Cipla, one of the leading pharma companies as its Chief Information Officer on 7th May, 2012. On what triggered the move, he cited better opportunities as the reason.

A day into his job at Cipla, Gupta declined to comment on his new role and key responsibility areas, stating that its too early to be able to give details on that. “It’s been just a day since I’ve joined here. There will be more clarity on this a month down the line,” he said while talking to Biztech2.com. His LinkedIn profile too doesn’t have any updates yet on his new responsibilities. Given his penchant for driving business value with business IT strategy and IT lead business innovation and transformation, one can speculate that his role at Cipla will involve Business IT leadership and involvement at the business strategy level to drive IT initiatives and not just pure technology.

Gupta has worked in the pharma domain in the past as well as Senior Director – Business Technology at Pfizer India, where he was a part of the India leadership team and Asia IT Strategy team. During his 3.5 years stint with the pharma company he helped define their IT outsourcing strategy and creation of Shared Service Centers, contributing to substantial savings and improvements to the global organisation.

Gupta’s exit from Shoppers Stop along with the retail chain’s CFO comes amidst media reports on belt-tightening and cost cutting measures being undertaken by the retail companies to stay profitable. Recent past has witnessed various senior level exits in the retail sector, including some top honchos at the Future Group.

Gupta is known in the industry and peer circles for putting technology to best use to drive business value. Gupta has aligned business & IT as few CIOs have and is today recognised not just as a CIO, but as a business thought leader, given his unique contributions to technology usage in India’s retail sector. In fact, he has also dabbled on the business side at Shoppers Stop where he had an additional charge of running the F&B business operations as its Business Head for several months.

Along with the Group CTO responsibilities, he also handled the additional role of Group CIO at K Raheja Corp spanning across Construction, Hospitality and other business units of the group.

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Gupta has over 28 years of experience spanning across a diverse range of verticals, including electronics, pharma, communications, logistics, finance, and real estate. He has worked with Philips Electronics, Pfizer, DSP Merrill Lynch, DHL Worldwide Express, Hughes Telecom to name a few.

A voracious writer on business IT issues, Gupta has been known to actively voice his opinion and insights on the business aspect of IT. He is a prolific speaker in many CIO and business leadership forums and has been honored with awards for many a pioneering Business IT implementations. Most recently, Biztech2.com conferred Gupta with the ‘CIO Of The Year’ award for his contributions.