GBM COO Atul Sharma to head Ruder Finn India

 25th September 2018    PR News 
 Paarul Chand

Genesis Burson-Marsteller COO, Atul Sharma, has stepped down and will now head Ruder Finn's operations in India. While Ruder Finn is yet to make a formal announcement regarding the new leadership, reliable sources confirmed the news. 

Sharma has spent 14 years with Genesis Burson-Marsteller and has a masters in business economics from Delhi University.

Even as GBM announced a slew of new appointments today, no replacement for Atul Sharma was announced. It is believed that Sharma will not be replaced, " as of now". In March, WPP announced that Cohn & Wolfe and Burson-Marsteller will merge globally to form Burson Cohn & Wolfe, a move that will impact India as well. At that point,  commenting on what would happen with GBM and Cohn & Wolfe Six Degrees, Cohn & Wolfe international spokesperson had told PRmoment India that, "In India, the firms will co-exist separately as Cohn & Wolfe Six Degrees remains on an earn-out." 

It's former country head, Radha Roy, who helped launched Ruder Finn India in 2010, left the organisation in May 2018 and the PR firm has been without a head since then. Roy told PRmoment India that she quit on May 31st, 2018 as, "I finished what I wanted to achieve at Ruder Finn, it is for someone new to build on that."

In the last one year, Ruder Finn won the LEE and WeWorks PR mandate. Ruder Finn also did a road show in India in 2017 to demonstrate its reputation risk assessment toolkit developed by 'Daylight Partnership', a firm acquired by Ruder Finn in 2016.

Ruder Finn is one of the world's largest privately owned PR firms, with four divisions including 'corporate reputation and transformation' and 'consumer connection'.