An Enigmatic Personality with Dynamic Leadership
A business aficionado who has been a high achiever in life with his dedication, diligence and deft abilities, Aditya K Mehta is the CFO of Orion Group in Bangladesh. Having scaled massive heights of success throughout his career, he has won prestigious awards like CFO of the Year 2021-22 and Man of Excellence Award for 2021-22 by Indian Achievers Forum. He has recently been awarded the ‘Man of Excellence Award’, on 21st July, at the 62nd National Summit on Atmnirbhar Bharat: Vision of New India. He is a Distinguished Life Member of Leaders Excellence at Harvard Square.
Raised in Kolkata when his parents shifted there, Aditya did his schooling at St. Xaviers Collegiate School and La Martiniere for Boys, two of the premier schools in the country. Afterwards, he did his BE in Electrical & Electronics from Bangalore University and later assisted his father in his business. He had to mentally struggle in high school after not being elected the Prefect and was determined in doing MBA and got selected in TAPMI, one of the top management institutes in the country, via the all-India CAT exam. He says “I can proudly say that, throughout my academic as well as professional journey, I have always been selected on merit. No donations, no back door entries, no sucking up to bosses – only on pure merit.”
Aditya’s professional journey began when he was recruited by TVS straight out of campus as a Management Trainee where he sold the company’s computer peripherals to the dealer, distributor and institutional channels in Mumbai Metropolitan Region. He then changed the direction and led teams in established US-based organizations like Citibank and Cargill. He was Cargill’s Senior Director of their Trade & Capital Markets business covering Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Mauritius, Nepal and Sri Lanka.
Currently, he is the CFO of Orion Group, one of the largest conglomerates in Bangladesh. He remarks “Recently, I facilitated a substantial medium-term project finance investment into operationalizing Bangladesh’s largest solar power plant affirming my commitment to the growth of clean, renewable energy and sustainable financing in South Asia”.
He feels that diversification is one of the key business model parameters and the company has one of the largest diversified conglomerates in Bangladesh, housing businesses ranging from footwear to consumer durables to textiles to pharma & healthcare to power & energy. This makes the company stand out in the crowd and is one of the reasons behind its ongoing success.
When Aditya joined Cargill, the largest privately held corporation in the U.S.A, from Citibank, then the largest bank in the U.S.A, he was prompted and advised to unlearn the banking experience that he had at Citibank. He says “I was proud and possessive of my Citi banking stint. But Cargill is not a bank, its Trade & Structured Finance business is way more innovative and nimble-footed. This resistance to changing my approach and unlearning the past didn’t help me. Only when I started going with the flow and stopped resisting the unlearning did I perform better.”
Having been the underdog, Aditya always had to be more sincere and transparent in his approach to life and work. He says “At the same time, I have the uncanny ability to surprise people since most don’t expect me to win or to do well. I stood 3rd in the 400 meters race in school out of 12 finalists when most didn’t expect me to be even in the top 5. I was among the only 2 students selected, from my MBA campus (out of more than 100 students), for the final interview in a very reputed FMCG firm after an intense multi-round selection process.”
He states that his professional contribution to making the economy stronger is Orion’s vision is to transform communities by blending the mix of integrity, teamwork and creativity of its people. He says “The fact that the Group, of which I am the CFO, is the 3rd largest private independent electric power producer in the country means that it is indirectly and directly contributing to many livelihoods in the country. The electricity supplied to the National Grid is used to run the garments and textile factories which incidentally is the largest employer and the largest foreign exchange earner for the nation.”
“Life itself has no meaning; it depends on us what meaning we want to derive from it and for that, we need to attach purposes at different stages in life. the way, I see it is, if you want to see the rainbow, you gotta put with the rain.”, he says has been his mantra for growth, development and success.