Indian-American Dhivya Suryadevara to become CFO at General Motors

Houston, June 14 An Indian-American woman, Dhivya Suryadevara has been named the Chief Finance Officer of the US’ largest automaker, General Motors

Dhivya Suryadevara, currently the vice president of corporate finance, will succeed Chuck Stevens, the GM’s present CFO, on September 1, the company said in a statement

Chennai-born Suryadevara, 39, has been GM’s vice president of corporate finance since July 2017. She will report to Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Mary Barra, 56, who has been head of the automaker since 2014. Suryadevara came to General Motors in 2005 with a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Commerce from the University of Madras, India and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She has played an integral role in some significant deals GM has made as it has restructured operations over the past several years. This includes the divestiture of the company’s European arm Opel and the acquisition of self-driving vehicle startup Cruise. She played a role in securing earlier this month a $2.25 billion investment in GM Cruise by Japanese tech giant SoftBank Group Corp.

Suryadevara has been with the company for 13 years now and according to the folks at General Motors she has helped achieve ratings upgrades from all three credit ratings agencies, completed $2 billion in notes issuance to fund discretionary pension contributions and upsized and renewed GM’s $14.5 billion revolving credit facility.

Barra and Suryadevara are the first women in their respective positions in the auto industry, as no other major global automaker has a female CEO, nor a CEO and CFO who are both female

GM will join a very short list of S&P 500 companies, including Hershey Co. and American Water Works Co., with women serving as CEO and CFO

She is a chartered financial analyst and accountant, and worked at UBS and PricewaterhouseCoopers before joining the Detroit-based GM in 2005 at the age of 25

“Dhivya’s experience and leadership in several key roles throughout our financial operations positions her well to build on the strong business results we’ve delivered over the last several years,” Barra said in a statement

Stevens, 58, has been CFO at the largest US automaker since January 2014 and will retire in March next year as a more than 40-year veteran of the company

He will remain with the company as an adviser until his retirement, the statement said