The last installment in our continent-wise shout-out to newly appointed CEOs actually worth knowing, after North America and Europe. This one covers Asia, including one appointment that’s already effective and one that’s been announced well ahead of the actual handover.
Kenta Kon — Toyota
Toyota named Kenta Kon, the company’s finance chief and a close ally of chairman Akio Toyoda, as its next CEO, with the change effective April 1, 2026. The move is notable for its timing as much as the choice itself: outgoing CEO Koji Sato is stepping down after only about three years in the role — a genuinely short tenure for a company of Toyota’s scale and deliberateness — moving into a newly created role as vice chairman and chief industry officer rather than leaving the company entirely.
Kon’s background is in finance rather than a traditional engineering or manufacturing path, which is itself a signal about what Toyota’s leadership sees as the central challenge ahead: managing the company’s enormous capital allocation decisions — across electric vehicle investment, traditional combustion and hybrid lines, and new mobility bets — probably matters more right now than it has in a generation, and a finance-first CEO is a specific, deliberate answer to that specific problem, not a default choice.
Why he’s worth watching: Toyota remains the world’s largest automaker by volume, and how it balances continued combustion and hybrid strength against EV investment shapes the pace of the entire industry’s transition, not just Toyota’s own product line.
Ashiss Kumar Dash — Infosys
Infosys named Ashiss Kumar Dash as CEO Designate in July 2026 — a title worth being precise about, because he won’t formally become CEO and Managing Director until April 1, 2027. That’s a genuinely long announced runway, longer than most CEO transitions get, and it follows outgoing CEO Salil Parekh’s nearly decade-long tenure, during which the company grew from roughly $10 billion to $20 billion in revenue while leading its push into digital transformation services.
Dash was promoted from within Infosys rather than brought in externally, continuing a pattern of internal succession at India’s second-largest IT services company. The long lead time between the designate announcement and the actual handover gives Dash an unusually extended runway to work alongside Parekh before fully taking over — a structure that trades speed for a lower-risk transition, worth naming as a deliberate choice rather than an accident of timing.
Why he’s worth watching: Indian IT services companies are navigating a genuinely difficult moment — client budgets under pressure, and AI-driven automation raising real questions about the traditional staffing-heavy services model Infosys and its peers built their scale on. How Dash’s Infosys adapts that model is a story with implications well beyond one company.
Next in this series
Three continents down, three to go — Africa, South America, and Oceania are next. If there’s a common thread across the appointments so far, it’s this: the companies that treated succession as a deliberate, disclosed process — GSK’s external-and-internal search, Infosys’s extended designate period, Berkshire’s multi-year public succession plan — are worth watching as much for how they chose as for who they chose.
