Mark Ashman joins HyperCITY Retail (India) Ltd., a leading hypermarket company of India as the Chief Executive Officer. Most recently he was the CEO of Marks and Spencer Reliance India Pvt Ltd, where he was instrumental in the roll out of Marks & Spencer’s retail strategy in India and establishing the JV between Marks & Spencer PLC and Reliance Retail.

Educated in the UK, Mark has a vast retail experience ranging from retail operations, sales & marketing, merchandising and corporate communications. He has held senior retail leadership roles in the UK and Internationally.

Mark is an intuitive retailer with his pulse on changing consumer needs. As a leader his strengths lies in his ability to build a highly motivated team.

Ashutosh Chakradeo holds a Masters degree in International trade. He has worked with The Bombay Store as a part of their B & M team, for a period of 7 years. He has also worked for Arcus from 2002 - 2004 as Category Manager, for their Home Improvement Division. Ashutosh joined Hypercity in 2004 and is currently the business Head - Food and Grocery. He has acquired knowledge and expertise in sourcing of products across Food & Non-Food categories over the last 14 years of working in the retail industry. He has traveled widely through Asia & Europe, in his sourcing management role.

Veneeth has over 14 years of experience in technology. He joined HyperCITY as Head,Technology in May 2006. Prior to that he was at Shoppers Stop and was responsible for the Loyalty, Point of Sale systems and the data warehouse systems. After his graduation in Computer Science from Bangalore University and a certificate course from NIIT, he joined NIIT as a Technical Lead. He worked at NIIT for 3 years after which he had a 1 year stint in the Indian Railways. He came to Mumbai to do a certification on Mid-range servers from IBM after which he joined Rhone-Poulenc (India) Ltd in 1998. At Rhone-Poulenc he was responsible for streamlining the ERP and for their Y2K rollout. He was recently honored by the CIO Magazine as one of the Top 20 CIO in their CIO Ones-to-Watch category for the year 2008. He subsequently also won the CIO Bold 100 awards in 2008 from the CIO Magazine. Hypercity was recently awarded for the use of technology in the Emerging Retail by JDA for their use of Replenishment tools and Space Planning tools.

An alumnus of NMIMS, where she acquired her Masters degree in HR Management., a microbiologist by training, she has gained significant experience through a variety of HR leadership roles over the last 16 years across different industries, including Media & Entertainment, Investment Banking, Telecom and Manufacturing.

Her last assignment was with Sony Entertainment Network, as Vice President & Head – HR, where she lead the HR function for the 4 channels of Sony Entertainment Network in India, Singapore and UK. Previously she worked for companies such as, Blue Star Limited, Tata Teleservices, Ambit RSM Pvt Ltd, and the Times Group.

Aparna is a great animal lover, a trained classical dancer, Reiki practitioner and Karate exponent who holds a Brown belt! She also enjoys more gentle pastimes of reading, travelling and gardening.

Darshana Shah holds a Master degree in Marketing from NMIMS .She has over 14 years of work experience with 6 years in the IT and 8 years in the retail sector. Thus her work experience spans from stepping into the IT Industry to establishing herself in the retail sector. With expertise in varied areas like operations, marketing, brand building, private brands marketing, retail communications. She has worked with retail giants like Shopper’s Stop, Future Group (Pantaloons and Big bazaar) & Reliance Retail.

Darshana is very passionate about travelling and meeting different people across the globe and learning about their culture & heritage. She loves dancing and is a certified Indian classical dancer (Bharatnatyam). An avid reader, she enjoys reading fiction and also loves experimenting with continental cuisines in her spare time.

Simon joins us from the Sultan Centre Group, where he is the Group Operations Director, responsible for 79 stores across 5 countries. Prior to this he was the Retail Director at a UK Health care Group.

He has a wealth of Retail experience gained through Store Manager, Area and Regional Operations Manager roles with Tesco, Marks and Spencer, B&Q, ASDA and JS Sainsbury both in the UK and overseas.