Anand Mahindra, Aditya Puri among Barron's top 30 global CEOs

Corporate honchos Anand Mahindra, Aditya Puri and Shantanu Narayen have been named in Barron's top 30 list of global chief executive officers (CEOs).

The 12th annual list of the world's 30 best CEOs includes top leaders from Amazon, JPMorgan, Netflix, Disney, Alphabet, Google and more.

This year's list replaced a third of last year's honorees, including many in Asia, and included nine new faces and one returnee — Jeffrey Bezos of Amazon — who proved their mettle as markets swayed and the economic recovery threatened to stumble.

“The job of identifying the world's best chief executives got harder this year, given plummeting energy prices, China's economic woes, and lukewarm corporate earnings,” Barron's said.

On Mahindra, managing director of Mahindra & Mahindra since 1997, Barron's said he has “transformed family's industrial business into a global conglomerate.”

“When India opened its economy to foreign competition in the 1990s, Mahindra & Mahindra seemed marked for extinction. But scion Mahindra ... restructured his family's company, transforming a business that made tractors and jeeps for rural India into a global conglomerate with interests in tractors, autos, technology, finance, and more,” it added.

Praising HDFC Bank Managing Director Puri, Barron's said he “built HDFC Bank from scratch into India's second-largest bank.”

“A career banker, Puri built HDFC into India’s second-largest private sector bank by assets after ICICI, while generating stock returns that beat Warren Buffett's,” it added.

On Narayen, Adobe Systems CEO since 2007, it said he had “the good and bad fortune of becoming Adobe's CEO in December 2007, on the brink of the economy's collapse. The shares fell 60 per cent in his first 15 months, but the crisis allowed him to revamp Adobe through acquisitions and in-house disruption.”

Others in the list include, Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway), David Cote (Honeywell International), Jamie Dimon (JPMorgan Chase), Larry Page (Alphabet), Howard Schultz (Starbucks) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) among others.