Sunil Dutt was the Managing Director, India, at Research In Motion (RIM) India Private Limited up to March 2013, and was responsible for overseeing and driving overall business strategy and growth for BlackBerry® in this region. Sunil joined RIM in December 2011. He has 29 years of cross industry experience that includes lighting, consumer durables, retail, telecom and information technology. Prior to RIM, he was the President of the Personal Systems Group of Hewlett-Packard India. He has rich functional experience that spans marketing, sales, distribution, brand, product management, customer orientation and people management.
With a career that began with Philips as a management trainee, Sunil became an instrumental part of the Philips leadership story in the area of lighting. He moved to Wipro’s fledgling lighting division in charge of marketing in North India. Under his guidance, within 18 months, Wipro rose to the No. 2 position in the lighting business in North India. In 1996 Sunil joined Whirlpool, a leading global consumer durable company. For the next 5 years he served in various sales and marketing functions across India. Whirlpool moved to the No. 1 position in every market that he was assigned to.
Always willing to take up a challenge and discover uncharted territories, Sunil moved to Barista, an espresso bar start up, in 2001. Within a year, he set up more than 70 espresso bars, turning Barista into the most popular brand of coffee shops across the country, and Barista became the most recognized brand without a single rupee in advertising spends.
In 2002 Sunil joined Nokia to become part of the country’s mobile revolution. He spent six years with Nokia as Director, Sales. Nokia saw its annual turnover in the handset business grow from US$ 10 million in 2002 to US$ 3 billion in 2006 under his able leadership.
At the end of 2007, Sunil took over Samsung’s Telecom Business as Country Head. Under him Samsung witnessed a major revamp in distribution, brand, product management, and customer orientation. The outcome was a sales and revenue growth of 400%, making Samsung the No. 2 player in the mobile handset market. Sunil has a deep understanding of the Indian consumer and a demonstrated capability to define new markets and businesses. His ability to successfully compete in extremely aggressive industries has been the hallmark of his career.
Sunil is a graduate of the Punjab University, Chandigarh, where he did his Masters in Business Administration with specialization in Marketing.
