most powerful women international

Fortune Editors

Kristen Bellstrom

Beth Kowitt

How Fortune ranks business's Most Powerful Women in the COVID era

Aaron Pressman

This ace engineer powered Amazon through the COVID crisis

The holidays used to be UPS's busiest time. Then came COVID-19

Claire Zillman

How Jane Fraser broke banking’s highest glass ceiling

Every year for this list, <em>Fortune </em>scans the globe to highlight the most powerful women in business based outside the United States. And every year, happily, the task gets harder. While women remain vastly under‐represented in C‐suites around the world—helming just 13 of the <a href="https://fortune.com/global500/">world’s 500 largest companies</a>—there are markedly more female executives each year taking their place at the highest ranks of corporate power. <a href="https://fortune.com/franchise-list-page/mpw-international-2020">Read more</a>

Walmsley was three years into her effort remaking the U.K. pharma giant when COVID-19 struck and scrambled the world’s priorities. As one of the world’s leading producers of vaccines and respiratory drugs, GSK found itself on the front lines of a pandemic, and the company has leaned into that role—making available its adjuvant technology to help in others’ vaccine development efforts; scaling up production of critical medicines like inhalers and pain relievers; and collaborating to identify effective therapeutics. The COVID-19 vaccine the company is developing with its French competitor Sanofi—and which is among those supported by the U.S. government’s Operation Warp Speed—entered clinical trials in September. Both GSK and Sanofi signed on to the industry pledge to manufacture and distribute a vaccine according to scientific and ethical standards, and Walmsley, who was recently awarded the title of Dame by Queen Elizabeth II, has argued the pandemic offers the industry an opportunity to better its badly tarnished reputation.<br />
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All the while, GSK’s business has plugged along. Sales and profits were up 4.8% and 22%, respectively, in 2019. Revenue increased 8% in the first half of 2020—powered by the growth of its consumer health division, largely owing to its merger with Pfizer’s business. While GSK’s vaccine and pharma divisions were dented by COVID-19 and disrupted medical care, sales of respiratory and cancer drugs are up for the year. The company has also launched three medicines in 2020, including a new drug for multiple myeloma.<br />
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Emma Walmsley

Ping An is nominally an insurance company. But the pandemic has underscored its technological prowess and gone a long way to fulfill the “technology-plus-finance” vision that Tan, an MIT and McKinsey alum, has for the company. Demand for its Good Doctor telehealth platform boomed as COVID-19 spread in China in early 2020: In the first half of the year, Good Doctor saw a 26.7% increase year on year in medical consultations as patients avoided hospitals and hands-on care. Other parts of Ping An’s sprawling business are also benefiting from rapid digitalization. Its smart-city arm is helping 118 cities in China digitize their government services as citizens remain wary of in-person interactions. Ping An’s hometown of Shenzhen, for instance, is aiming to deliver 7,000 services on a single app.<br />
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Jessica Tan

COVID-19 has not been kind to European banks, including the one Botín took over from her late father six years ago. In July, Santander took a 12.6 billion euro ($14.9 billion) write-down on assets, blaming the pandemic’s effect on the economic outlook, and reported its first quarterly loss in the Spanish bank’s 163-year history. Botín, who recently warned about the consequences of a second and potentially third wave of coronavirus crisis, in March became the first European financial executive to take a pay cut in the face of the pandemic. She and Santander CEO José Antonio Álvarez donated half their total compensation, including bonuses, to a fund the bank set up to buy medical equipment and support coronavirus research.<br />
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Ana Botín

Helmersson enters the list this year at No. 4, after being appointed CEO of H&amp;M Group in January on the eve of the pandemic. It’s been a transformative year for the company. The fashion group, which owns labels including Monki and COS alongside megabrand H&amp;M, saw its stores shut as global lockdowns came into force: At one point in the second quarter the group said 80% of its roughly 5,000 stores worldwide were closed. That’s resulted in a loss in the first three quarters this year of about $140 million. But Helmersson has also highlighted the investments the group made pre-pandemic in digital shopping and has stated that sustainability in fashion is more important than ever as she pushes for products made from either sustainable or recycled materials.<br />
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Helena Helmersson

The pandemic hit offline retailers hard, and Gree’s sales slumped in the first half of 2020, with overall revenue down 28% year on year and revenue for its main product, air conditioners, down 48% in the same period. Gree chairwoman and president Dong Mingzhu, who is considered one of China’s steeliest business leaders, adapted to the times by hosting live-streaming events to sell products while Chinese consumers were stuck at home and Gree’s 30,000 brick-and-mortar dealers were closed. Dong made around $34,000 in her first live stream in April; at a shareholder meeting afterward, she blamed the low figure on inexperience and a lack of preparation. Undeterred, Dong hosted more live-stream events throughout the summer, steadily building up sales. Over the course of a four-hour live stream in September, Dong sold $175 million worth of Gree products.<br />
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Dong Mingzhu

An insurance industry insider and Aviva board member, Blanc took over at the $89.6 billion London-based Aviva in July when her predecessor stepped down for family health reasons 15 months into the job. Blanc has moved quickly to recenter the company, working to offload secondary businesses—in Singapore, France, and Italy—to focus on its core U.K., Ireland, and Canada markets. Blanc has rejected calls to split Aviva’s life and general insurance businesses into separate companies and has made it her mission for Aviva to become the U.K’s leading insurer.<br />
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Amanda Blanc

Merz joined the supervisory board of Thyssenkrupp, the storied but troubled German conglomerate, in December 2018. Last October, after the CEO of 14 months was ousted, she became the $47 billion company’s interim chief executive. And then, in April, after selling off the group’s most profitable elevator business for $18.9 billion and winning the support of her clashing shareholders, she was given the official CEO title and a three-year term. That’s not to say the hard work for Merz is over. She is now focused on what to do about the group’s ailing steel division. Though she has expressed openness to ideas, including state involvement, U.K.-based Liberty Steel made a bid for the business in mid-October. Beyond that, there’s shoring up the company’s financials and other units to ensure the company has a strong future. Merz, a mechanical engineer, spent much of her career at Bosch and has served on the supervisory boards of Lufthansa and Volvo.<br />
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Martina Merz

A year ago, Rose became the first woman to run one of Britain’s four big lenders, breaking a financial-industry glass ceiling—and taking on one crisis cleanup job just as another crisis began. In February, Rose announced plans to rebrand Royal Bank of Scotland as NatWest Group, seeking to end the legacy of the bank’s 2008 government bailout as the pandemic started to roil the global economy and led NatWest to swing to a pretax loss of $1.7 billion in the second quarter. Yet despite the ongoing business and economic challenges, Rose hasn’t lost her focus on climate change and sustainability. She vowed in February to make NatWest Group’s operations net zero by the end of this year. NatWest has also pledged to reduce or eliminate the business it does with oil, gas, and coal-related companies as part of a commitment to further the 2015 Paris Agreement on curbing global temperature increases.<br />
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Alison Rose

Wikramanayake joined Macquarie in 1987, and the business grew with her; she established offices in New Zealand, Malaysia, and Hong Kong, as well as infrastructure funds in the U.S. and Canada. In the wake of the financial crisis, she built the bank’s fledgling asset management business into the company’s most profitable. Now, in her second year as CEO, she is betting big on a green energy transition, steering investments toward renewables and climate-resilient infrastructure. With the pandemic, she’s made the systems that power the digital economy a priority, too. Wikramanayake’s climate commitments extend beyond Macquarie, serving on the World Bank-led Global Commission on Adaptation as well as the UN's Climate Finance Leadership Initiative. She's also advising the Australian government on green technology investment. While the pandemic has dampened the financial services business—net operating income decreased 3% for the fiscal year ending March 2020—Wikramanayake has made efforts to soften the blow for others, hiring those who lost jobs to work in Macquarie call centers and lending the resources of its portfolio companies, such as parking lots that became testing centers, to the fight against COVID-19.<br />
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Shemara Wikramanayake

It’s been a big year for Garijo, who in September was announced as the next CEO of [hotlink ignore="true"]Merck KGaA—the Darmstadt, Germany–based pharma company with $19 billion in annual revenues and a market capitalization of $66.2 billion. That news followed her promotion to deputy CEO and vice chairman of the executive board in July and positions her to become just one of two women running a major pharmaceutical company when she takes over in May 2021. (Emma Walmsley, No. 1, on this list is the other.) While COVID-19 had a significant negative impact on the health care division Garijo has overseen for the past five years, with sales declining 10.6% to $1.77 billion in Q2, she played a key leadership role in a cross-divisional COVID-19 innovation task force that established a portfolio of about 50 potential projects, including vaccines, transmission control and virus detection measures, access to therapies, and predictive modeling.<br />
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Belén Garijo

In her 13 years at Alibaba, Wu has helped China’s largest e-commerce empire go public three times: once in 2007, when Alibaba.com started trading; again in 2014 as Alibaba went public on the NYSE; and a third time in 2019 when Alibaba carried out a secondary listing in Hong Kong. Alibaba’s debut in Hong Kong raised $11.2 billion, making it 2019’s biggest IPO at the time. (Saudi Aramco eclipsed it weeks later.) When Alibaba founder Jack Ma stepped down from the company’s 11-member board, it selected Wu to fill his seat—a promotion she received in October that was a nod to her value at the firm.<br />
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Maggie Wu

Apple was the fastest-growing smartphone maker in China in the second quarter of 2020, staging a swift recovery after sales sank in the first quarter when it shuttered all its China stores at the start of the coronavirus outbreak in late January. China—where half the world’s iPhones are made—will be crucial to the company’s plan to reach carbon neutrality by 2030, a goal it announced in July. Isabel Ge Mahe, who runs Apple’s China operations, will oversee the firm’s sustainable shift in China. She told Chinese state news agency Xinhua in July that Apple plans to achieve its carbon neutral goal by obtaining commitments from Chinese suppliers to use 100% renewable energy sources to produce Apple goods. “We need strong policies that support climate action from governments around the world. The private sector can’t do it alone,” Ge Mahe told Xinhua. Apple in July also announced a partnership with the U.S.-China Green Fund that will invest $100 million in energy efficiency projects for its suppliers, on top of its existing China Clean Energy Fund, which aims to invest almost $300 million by 2022 to develop renewable energy projects.<br />
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Isabel Ge Mahe

MacGregor is poised to become the only woman leading a company in the CAC 40—France’s benchmark stock index—when she takes the reins at the utility Engie on Jan. 1. MacGregor, an engineer who spent much of her career at the oil services firm Schlumberger, arrives at the $67.2 billion company—of which the French state holds a 23.64% stake and 33.96% voting rights—at an awkward time. Her predecessor, Isabelle Kocher, who attempted to transform the company into a green energy giant, was ousted in February; interim management focused on shedding non-core businesses, but continued down the path Kocher had forged. Revenue and profits were both down by nearly 10% in 2019; 2020’s numbers will not be kinder.<br />
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Catherine MacGregor

The largest private equity firm run by a woman got bigger this year. France’s Ardian, also the largest private equity firm in Europe, increased its assets under management by 4%, to $100 billion, and has been expanding rapidly. In June, it raised an industry-record $19 billion to buy secondary stakes in other private equity funds, and in September, it raised another $2.4 billion to expand its investments in European midsize firms. Senequier, who founded Axa’s private equity arm in 1996 and spun it out as Ardian in 2013, now oversees 700 employees globally, who collectively own a majority of the firm. This year Ardian also introduced an additional initiative to measure the sustainability efforts of its portfolio companies and to track their progress in areas relating to climate change, diversity, profit sharing, and ethical governance.<br />
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Dominique Senequier

When the coronavirus first broke out in Wuhan, China, in late January, China’s biggest ride-hailing company, Didi Chuxing, sprang into action, organizing free transportation for Wuhan’s medical workers who were stranded when the city halted other modes of transportation. Under Jean Liu's leadership, the company tried to ease the hardship drivers experienced because of the pandemic, launching a $30 million fund to provide protective supplies and financial assistance to drivers and negotiating with leasing firms and insurers on behalf of Chinese drivers who’d seen business dry up. Liu also spearheads Didi’s tech investment, including the launch of its pilot robo-taxi service in Shanghai in June and tests of its autonomous vehicles in the U.S. and China. On Liu’s watch, Didi is continuing to grow internationally. Since July 2019, the firm has entered Chile, Costa Rica, Panama, and Russia, and expanded in existing markets across Latin America, Asia, and Australia.<br />
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Jean Liu

As CEO and president director of Pertamina, Indonesia’s state-owned energy company, Widyawati oversees an enterprise with more than $54.6 billion in annual revenue and some 32,000 employees around the globe. An engineer by training, Widyawati was made Pertamina’s chief in 2018 after her predecessor was dismissed in the midst of restructuring efforts. The government recently reaffirmed its confidence in her to carry out the company’s transformation to a holding company with publicly listed subsidiaries over the next two years. COVID-19 has presented challenges; in April, Pertamina reduced its targets for oil production owing to lower demand and is cutting costs and capital spending.<br />
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Nicke Widyawati

The pandemic year hasn’t weighed down Fortescue Metals Group. The Australian mining firm reported record earnings for its fiscal year ending June 2020, with $12.8 billion in revenue. That performance, as well as the 108% increase in the company’s share price in the past 12 months, has been driven by strong iron ore prices and enormous demand from China. Fortescue is a core supplier of iron ore to China’s steel industry, which is producing at record levels despite a disruption owing to the coronavirus earlier this year. (Reduced iron ore production in South America has also helped.) Worsening diplomatic relations between Australia and China have so far not hurt the company, whose second-largest shareholder is one of China’s state-owned steel companies.<br />
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Gaines, who worked in other industries before taking the top job at Fortescue in 2018, credits her compassionate leadership style for successfully navigating COVID-19 operating challenges. Since the outbreak began, the company has sent more than 1 million text messages, offering words of support or information on COVID management measures, to employees and stakeholders. She’s also spoken out against sexism in the industry and advocated for increasing the representation of women in the sector and corporate Australia more broadly.<br />
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Elizabeth Gaines

In September, NYSE-listed Yum China pursued a secondary offering in Hong Kong and raised $2.2 billion, one of the largest offerings in Hong Kong so far this year, but share performance on the first day of trading flopped amid lingering doubts about recovery prospects for restaurants during the pandemic. (The share price has climbed since then.) Wat, CEO of Yum China since March 2018, oversaw the company’s COVID-19 relief efforts, including the provision of free meals to frontline medical workers in 1,450 hospitals across 28 provinces in China. Yum China also launched a family care fund in February to provide extra health protection for employees’ families, a program that now covers over 31,000 workers. Pandemic aside, Yum China reached the 10,000-store milestone in China in July.<br />
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Joey Wat

It’s hard to imagine trickier conditions to navigate for Rigail, who is less than two years into her tenure atop Air France. She came into the job facing an aging fleet of airplanes, stiff competition from low-cost carriers, and earlier this year, French labor disputes. Then came the pandemic that all but ground the travel industry to a halt. Rigail, who has committed to ambitious sustainability goals, has used the moment to accelerate restructuring plans. Results for 2020 will not be pretty, though; despite implementing strict hygiene measures and an Air France Protect program, revenue for the airline was down 70% year over year in August.<br />
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Anne Rigail

Temasek, Singapore’s state investment firm that Ho oversees, had been on a roll since 2016, with its portfolio growing each year. The pandemic brought that streak to an end as the net value of Temasek’s portfolio shrunk by 2% to roughly $214 billion in its latest fiscal year. The year also saw Temasek’s holdings in China surpass those in its home market for the first time. Early in the coronavirus crisis, Temasek threw a lifeline to Singapore Airlines by backing the state carrier’s rights issue worth $6.3 billion, and the fund courted Singaporeans’ goodwill by giving away hand sanitizer and face masks through its foundation. Ho has a bigger platform than most executives because she is married to Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, whose party won reelection in July. She has used her much-watched Facebook account to back the city-state’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak and defend Temasek as it faced criticism for hiring employees who aren’t Singaporean. “We are enriched by our diversity and our open minds,” she wrote.<br />
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Ho Ching

China’s automobile industry has staged a furious comeback after the coronavirus outbreak ravaged the country in the first quarter. Great Wall Motor, China’s top pickup maker, is contributing to the surge. Sales across all its brands increased 18% in September, though sales remain down 6% for the year. Wang’s ongoing effort to expand Great Wall overseas got a boost this fall, when the automaker agreed to acquire a General Motors production facility in Rayong, Thailand—its 11th full-scale automobile manufacturing base worldwide. At the same time, GWM’s proposal to acquire another GM manufacturing plant in India hit a roadblock as the Indian government tightened restrictions on foreign direct investment amid an ongoing military conflict with China; GWM’s proposal is now under government review. GWM has invested $2.5 billion in R&amp;D in the past five years, and Wang pledged in May to pour another $4.5 billion into electrification, intelligent vehicles, and mobility technologies in the coming years. One high-tech project GWM plans to bring to market in 2023: hydrogen fuel-cell passenger cars.<br />
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Wang Fengying

Scrimgeour became head of the investment management arm of British insurance giant Legal &amp; General in July 2019, and has thrived despite the pandemic: Assets under management increased 9% year over year in the first half of 2020, to 1.2 trillion pounds ($1.6 trillion). Scrimgeour’s executive team is 46% women, but she acknowledged recently that the composition of her asset managers is “not where we want to be” in terms of racial diversity. She is optimistic that her firm and her industry will improve after this year’s “moment of potential inflection.” Legal &amp; General Investment Management is also ratcheting up its pressure on other companies over environmental standards by publishing its climate ratings for more than 1,000 firms—and threatening sanctions, potentially including divestment from some funds, on those that fall short.<br />
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Michelle Scrimgeour

A graduate of the University of Houston, Faber became president of global foods and refreshment at Unilever in 2019, overseeing a $23 billion business operating in 190 countries that includes brands such as Ben &amp; Jerry’s, Breyer’s, and Lipton. The unit, Unilever’s second largest, accounts for 37% of the multinational’s total revenue. Faber has taken steps to make her division of Unilever healthier: She sold off its butter and margarine business for a cool $9.4 billion to instead invest in more environmentally and health-conscious food businesses like the Vegetarian Butcher, a global plant-based meat-substitute supplier. Even in the midst of the pandemic, Faber managed to lead her foods and refreshment businesses to results mirroring those of last year.<br />
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Hanneke Faber

As the president and CEO of Norsk Hydro since May 2019, Aasheim has faced no shortage of challenges. She stepped into the post just months after the world’s largest integrated aluminum business was hit by a ransomware attack, which forced employees to use pen and paper and some facilities to shut down. The company was praised for its management of that crisis, but it was a difficult year all around. Sinking aluminum prices undercut revenue, which fell 6%, while the company posted a loss in 2019. The pandemic’s impact on global construction and trade has also hit the company hard, but under Aasheim, Norsk Hydro has continued to further its vision of low-carbon aluminum and expand recycling facilities, with all operations in its home country of Norway now powered by renewable energy.<br />
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Hilde Merete Aasheim

A self-described “mathy” executive at the top of Loblaw Companies—which comprises nearly 2,400 grocery stores and pharmacies across Canada—Davis is the data-obsessed president behind the nuts and bolts of the group, which brought in over $36 billion last year. That includes a push to expand the group’s e-commerce business, a fortuitous decision ahead of the pandemic. The company saw basket sizes quadruple in the early days of the pandemic. While online sales had already nearly doubled year on year in 2019, sales were up by 280% in just the second quarter of 2020. It hasn’t been easy to capitalize on that jump: the costs of safeguarding employees and customers has largely reversed profit gains—but the nature of shopping has changed for good.<br />
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Sarah Davis

Kadri has made quick work of overhauling the 157-year old Belgian chemicals company she took over last March. After completing Solvay’s largest-ever listening exercise on record—involving some 24,000 employees in more than 60 countries—she has reoriented the $12.6 billion business around purpose, prioritizing sustainable and circular products. The French-Moroccan CEO is also focused on diversity and inclusion initiatives and recently announced a 16-week parental leave policy for employees. She’s also bettered Solvay’s finances through much-praised cost-control efforts. Though COVID-19 hit the company hard—leading to plant shutdowns, furloughs, and reduced demand from aerospace and oil and gas customers—Solvay has also been involved in the pandemic response, manufacturing antibacterial gels and materials that go in everything from diagnostics to PPE.<br />
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Ilham Kadri

As the CEO of Denmark-based Danske Commodities, Kristiansen oversaw the company’s acquisition by Norwegian oil and gas giant Equinor in early 2019—part of its push into energy trading, particularly in the renewables and gas space Danske has capitalized on as Europe has moved toward lower-carbon fuels. The company brought in over $11 billion in revenue in 2019, even as its profit was dented by what Kristiansen called a “relatively uneventful” year with fewer trading opportunities. Both Danske and Equinor have now committed to cut their emissions to net zero by 2050. And Kristiansen, who has been at Danske since its early years, has looked to expand its renewable-heavy trading strategy out of Europe into the U.S. and South America, and to further automate its trading. And that's all amid a tumultuous year for energy markets as the pandemic has thrown demand into disarray.<br />
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Helle Østergaard Kristiansen

An industry veteran, Kirkby took charge at Telia, the $9.1 billion Swedish telecom with operations throughout Scandinavia and the Baltics, in May. Shareholders seem pleased with her arrival and her recent decision to sell the world’s largest international fiber network—which spans 115 countries and is used by 900 other telecom operators and tech companies—as well as the company’s stakes in Turkish and Afghan telecom operators; the company’s stock is up 30% in that time. The Swedish government holds a roughly 40% stake in the 167-year-old company. Kirkby, who sits on the board of BT, previously helmed competitor Tele2 and was in the middle of a turnaround job at Danish telecom TDC when she was recruited by Telia.<br />
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Allison Kirkby

Uhl marks another year on the list amid a time of tremendous change for Shell, where she has been CFO since 2017. In the spring during global lockdowns, the company announced it would target net-zero emissions by 2050, the largest oil and gas company to make such a commitment. The target represents a profound transformation for the Anglo-Dutch giant away from its oil and gas roots, and it came during a punishing year financially, as demand for oil plunged. Shell managed to avoid a loss owing to strong trading profits, but it announced billions of dollars in write-downs in 2020 and up to 9,000 layoffs by the end of 2022. Uhl has driven measures this year to support the long-term health of the company and has built on her reputation for pushing for both tax and climate transparency among the world’s energy giants.<br />
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Jessica Uhl

When White arrived in February at John Lewis Partnership, profits had been struggling for years, and sales were battered by shifts in shopping (think digital) and a viciously competitive grocery sector, even as the company remained one of U.K.’s best loved brands with its union of department stores and the upmarket Waitrose grocery chain. A Cambridge-educated economist who has been granted the honorific of “Dame,” White had spent her previous career as a senior civil servant. The pandemic didn’t make her job easier. White was forced to permanently close eight stores, while temporary lockdown closures caused half-year sales to fall 10%, and to ax the annual bonus for employees—who own the company in a partnership model—for the first time in 67 years. But her turnaround strategy promises a much-anticipated shake-up, looking toward digital commerce and delivery services.<br />
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Sharon White

Schaffert is in her second year leading Novartis’s $14.4 billion oncology division. With more than 10,000 employees in 85 countries and a portfolio of 25 drugs, the business has thrived under Schaffert’s leadership, with revenue growing 10% last year. Despite the spread of COVID-19 and disruption to medical care around the world, sales were up 6% in the first half of 2020; that may be in part to Schaffert’s efforts to serve, educate, and advocate for cancer patients during the pandemic. The company introduced home delivery and monitoring to ensure patients got their meds, and in April, Schaffert launched a video series to help them navigate their condition during the pandemic. In the past 12 months, the business has won four new regulatory approvals for its cancer portfolio; it’s also studying whether its existing drugs could help in the fight against COVID.<br />
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Susanne Schaffert

After being appointed to SAP’s executive board in 2017, Fox-Martin earned another promotion in February of 2020. She is now responsible for the entirety of the German-based software company’s new Customer Success board area. In that role, Fox-Martin is responsible for 40,000-plus employees and almost all of SAP’s more than $30 billion in annual revenue. She’s also shown a commitment to diversity and inclusion efforts, sponsoring programs such as Autism at Work and Back to Work, which creates a path for mothers returning to their professional careers, as well as founding an initiative focused on addressing major global challenges.<br />
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Adaire Fox-Martin

The first Asian female CEO of a P&amp;G business unit, Fama Francisco led the company’s baby care and feminine care sectors to their best year in a decade in terms of profit growth. In her position, Francisco oversees more than 13,000 employees and around $12 billion in yearly revenue, representing 17% of P&amp;G global sales. She’s spearheaded numerous global campaigns focused on female empowerment, including the #ShareTheLove, #EndPeriodPoverty, and #LikeAGirl movements.<br />
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Fama Francisco

It’s been another tumultuous year for Puma, the energy company in which trading company Trafigura and Angolan state energy company Sonangol each hold large stakes. In 2020, the energy sector as a whole suffered as demand was hit by global lockdowns, and Puma’s sales volumes dropped nearly 17% in the first half of the year. But FitzGerald, an industry veteran, has continued her strategy of simplifying and cost cutting, including selling assets in Australia this year and focusing on infrastructure and growth markets across Africa, Asia, and South America, where Puma has sprawling retail gas station networks.<br />
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Emma FitzGerald

Ranked just two spots after her peer Fama Francisco, Keith is the second CEO of a P&amp;G business unit to make the list. Heading P&amp;G’s global beauty division, Keith oversees around 11,000 employees and is responsible for brands such as Pantene, Olay, Old Spice, and Head &amp; Shoulders. In the company’s most recently completed fiscal year, Keith managed to grow net sales to $13.4 billion and net earnings to $2.7 billion––each representing a 4% increase from the previous year. Under Keith’s leadership, that kind of growth has become a trend: This marks the 19th consecutive quarter that the businesses Keith leads have moved upward.<br />
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R. Alexandra (Alex) Keith

Han, a former tech journalist who became Naver’s first female CEO in 2017, has spent the past two years expanding the Internet giant’s payments service, its e-commerce site, and its cloud services. Those investments paid off as the pandemic accelerated consumers’ migration to digital platforms; its operating revenue increased 16.7% year on year in the second quarter of 2020. Naver’s cloud computing business was an especially bright spot. The division’s revenue grew 70% in the second quarter compared with last year, contributing to a quarterly net profit of $76 million. Naver also introduced tools to help South Koreans navigate the coronavirus crisis, including a search function that ranked pharmacies by how many masks were in stock.<br />
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Han Seong-Sook

Company veteran Maki Akaida is highly tipped to replace 71-year old Fast Retailing president Tadashi Yanai when—if—he retires. Akaida was promoted to head of Uniqlo Japan—the brand’s biggest market—in June 2019 and has steered the company through an unprecedented pandemic. The outbreak forced Fast Retailing to close stores worldwide in early 2020, resulting in a 40% sales drop in the quarter from March to May. But Uniqlo’s LifeWear garments—cozy sweatpants, soft T-shirts—have become a sort of quarantine uniform, especially in Japan. Demand for the line’s AIRism masks, in particular, have drawn customers back to physical stores. While many retailers are reconsidering brick-and-mortar stores, Uniqlo Japan is expanding its footprint. It opened a new omnichannel store in Tokyo’s fashionable Harajuku district in June, where tablets display outfit suggestions that customers can then purchase in store. Same-store sales grew 26% year on year across the country that month.<br />
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Maki Akaida

After taking over investment manager Fidelity nearly two years ago, Richards has boosted its assets to $565.7 billion, which are managed on behalf of more than 2.5 million clients worldwide. Like many other large asset managers, Fidelity is increasing its focus on sustainable investing. Last year, the firm created proprietary ESG ratings, which it has used to assess and score more than 3,700 companies. During the pandemic, Richards has also become more vocal on the need to rethink capitalism and take into account wider environmental and social mandates.<br />
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Anne Richards

In early 2020, Starbucks China—with more than 4,400 stores and 58,000 employees in the country—looked like it would be one of the biggest economic casualties of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. At the time, Wong, working with very little information on the then-mysterious, fast-spreading disease, closed down 80% of her stores. The company continued to pay impacted employees, and offered them counseling, online courses, and financial assistance when needed. As the virus spread around the globe, Wong’s management of the situation became a model—not just for Starbucks but for the broader corporate community. Starbucks China’s business has rebounded since the year’s early months, and Wong continues to pursue partnerships—like those with Sequoia Capital, and Alibaba and Tencent—that put the company on the leading edge of Chinese retail.<br />
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Belinda Wong

Of all pandemic-hit industries, the travel sector arguably has suffered the most. Trip.com Group, a travel service provider, is certainly one proof point. Its revenue plunged 42% in the first quarter of 2020 and 64% in the second, compared with the same periods in 2019. China, Trip’s home market, has largely contained the COVID-19 outbreak, and its travel comeback has helped take the edge off those ugly numbers. Sun said in September that reservations for domestic flights and hotels in China had made a “full recovery,” as mainland travelers embarked on short-haul trips within the country. Early on in the pandemic, Trip enlisted airlines and hotels to offer penalty-free trip cancellations to customers, and Sun herself took no salary for a period starting in March.<br />
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Jane Jie Sun

<span data-sheets-formula-bar-text-style="font-size:13px;color:#000000;font-weight:normal;text-decoration:none;font-family:'Arial';font-style:normal;text-decoration-skip-ink:none;">As CEO of PepsiCo’s business operations in all of Latin America, Santilli is in charge of two of the food and beverage behemoth’s top six markets worldwide (Mexico and Brazil). From 2018 to 2019, PepsiCo Latin America’s net revenue grew by 3% to $7.6 billion. Starting with the company back in 2001, Santilli worked her way up the PepsiCo food chain, holding a position as vice president and general manager of the firm’s savory business unit in Mexico before becoming COO and later president of PepsiCo Mexico Foods. In February, she helped publish </span><span data-sheets-formula-bar-text-style="font-size:13px;color:#000000;font-weight:normal;text-decoration:none;font-family:''Arial'';font-style:italic;text-decoration-skip-ink:none;"><em>The Power of Empowerment: Women Building Latin America</em>,</span><span data-sheets-formula-bar-text-style="font-size:13px;color:#000000;font-weight:normal;text-decoration:none;font-family:'Arial';font-style:normal;text-decoration-skip-ink:none;"> a book that “aims to accelerate the development of professional women in the region.”</span><br />
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Paula Santilli

Last year, Mahanyele-Dabengwa became the first Black African to run Naspers, the century-old South African media company, in its home market. Her appointment was highly symbolic. Naspers, with a market cap of $80 billion, is now best known for its global tech investments—mainly, the very smart bet it made on Tencent back in 2001—but the company spent decades supporting South Africa’s apartheid regime through its newspapers. (The company formally apologized for its role in 2015.) Mahanyele-Dabengwa is charged with growing Naspers’s $4 billion business in South Africa; beyond the day-to-day, she is focused on making smart and impactful tech investments locally, through the company’s new $100 million Foundry fund. Mahanyele-Dabengwa arrived with plenty of investing experience having previously founded her own firm, Sigma Capital. Before that, she led the Shanduka Group, an investment holding company founded by current South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa.<br />
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Phuthi Mahanyele-Dabengwa

Even as the city of Hong Kong has faced unprecedented uncertainty from political protests, Beijing’s new national security law, the coronavirus, and its role as a ground zero for escalating U.S.-Sino tensions, HKEX is having a good year. In August, the stock exchange operator posted a record half-year profit of $674 million, up 1% from the year before. In recent months, the bourse has emerged as an alternative to American exchanges for Chinese firms wary of Washington’s anti-China rhetoric. Since Cha became the first female chairman of the HKEX in 2018, the exchange has ranked No. 1 among IPO venues, when measured by proceeds. It will compete for the title again this year, since Ant Group, the Chinese fintech giant founded by Jack Ma, is planning to go public with listings in Hong Kong and Shanghai in what’s expected to be the world’s largest-ever IPO.<br />
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Laura Cha

With 25 million–plus customers and a private valuation of more than $10 billion, Brazilian fintech startup Nubank is the world’s largest digital bank—and the only female-founded company to reach such a lofty valuation. Cofounder Junqueira previously worked at Brazilian banking giant Itaú Unibanco and at LuizaCred, the financial services unit of Brazilian retailer Magazine Luiza—but, she says, eventually she grew tired of “making rich people richer.” Launched in 2013, Nubank provides an alternative to Brazilian banks’ sky-high interest rates through its fee-free credit card and customer-friendly mobile app. This year the company expanded into Mexico, where it is continuing to bring down the cost of financial services for unbanked and lower-income customers.<br />
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Cristina Junqueira

In March, Kelly Zhang, a newcomer to the Most Powerful Women International list, was promoted from CEO of Douyin, <a href="https://fortune.com/company/tiktok/">TikTok</a>’s mainland China sister app, to CEO of ByteDance China. The new role puts her in charge of flagship apps like Douyin, news aggregator Toutiao, and other Chinese platforms operated by ByteDance, a Beijing-based tech firm that’s considered one of the most valuable unicorns in the world. Outside the China market, ByteDance’s app TikTok has been at the center of a still-unresolved political dispute between China and the U.S. as the Trump administration pursues a ban of the platform over alleged national security concerns, which ByteDance denies. But within China, ByteDance is thriving. Zhang, who joined ByteDance in 2014 after it acquired a photo-sharing app that she cofounded, helped create Douyin in 2016 and grew its daily active users to over 600 million as of August.<br />
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Kelly Zhang

The first female CEO of the Dutch information services provider Wolters Kluwer, McKinstry has held the position since 2003 and continues to oversee the company’s successful transition away from print, with 89% of the firm’s revenue coming from digital and services in 2019. Managing more than $5.4 billion in yearly revenue and around 19,000 employees, McKinstry grew organic revenue by 4% over 2019 and an additional 3% during the the first half of 2020. She’s also taken steps to improve the diversity of her executive team, with women making up 50% of both the executive board and division CEOs.<br />
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Nancy McKinstry

Despite a tense year for U.S.-China relations, Christianson secured a significant breakthrough for Morgan Stanley, where she has been a longtime leader and champion of its Chinese business. In March, Chinese regulators granted Morgan Stanley and rival Goldman Sachs approval to take control of their local joint ventures, giving the U.S.-based banks a better foothold to expand their Asia-Pacific operations. As CEO of China and co-CEO of Asia-Pacific, where Morgan Stanley’s revenues (ex-Japan) are up 44% annually for the first nine months of 2020, Christianson also led her bank’s response to the early days of the pandemic. By September, more than 70% of Morgan Stanley’s China employees had returned to work in mainland China—without reporting a single coronavirus infection.<br />
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Wei Sun Christianson

Appointed CEO of Anglo American Platinum in April, Viljoen now heads the world’s second-largest mining company and the largest refiner of platinum group metals. Already overseeing an integrated mining, processing, and marketing business with more than $6 billion in yearly revenue, Viljoen is confident that investments in modernization and technological advancement––such as the development of the world’s largest hydrogen-powered mine haul truck, which will be powered by hydrogen from renewable energy sources––will further the company’s growth going forward, as leading markets continue to prioritize firms who conduct business sustainably. Exemplary of its commitment to sustainability and societal impact, AAP was ranked first out of 55 peers in the precious metals sector by ratings firm Sustainalytics in its ESG index.<br />
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Natascha Viljoen

It was a momentous year for Al-Suhaimi, the first woman to chair the Saudi Stock Exchange, the Tadawul: The exchange hosted the world’s largest-ever initial public offering in December when it listed Aramco, the Saudi oil firm that currently stands as the world’s second most valuable company. Al-Suhaimi, who was reappointed to a second three-year term chairing the Tadawul earlier this year, is also the CEO of NCB Capital, an arm of National Commercial Bank. She became the first woman to run a Saudi investment bank when she took that job in 2014.<br />
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Sarah Al-Suhaimi

In October, Madisa took the reins at Bidvest, a sprawling $5 billion conglomerate whose businesses span from pharmaceuticals and office furniture to banking, cleaning, and logistics services. Just 41, Madisa’s appointment was announced on the eve of International Women’s Day in 2019—when none of the largest companies on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange had a female CEO—and was publicly celebrated by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who called her life and career trajectory “an inspiration to all of us.”<br />
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Indeed, Madisa’s ascent to the highest ranks of power was hard-earned. Raised by a single mother, she has described her upbringing as a “tough” but typical one for Black South Africans: growing up “with not enough money, thinking about whether you’re going to be able get into a university or not, wondering if you’re going to be able to finish or not.” For Madisa, the stakes of graduating were high; failing to do so meant “I won’t be able to change my own life or my family’s life,” she told CNBC Africa last year.<br />
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Madisa spent many of her post-university years learning the Bidvest business by working at one of its subsidiaries; after a brief stint in government, she returned and then moved to the head office, where she was trained by Bidvest's founder and her predecessor. She took over as CEO at a challenging moment, with the battered South African economy in a severe recession. In a recent interview with CNBC Africa, she said she would maintain Bidvest’s “performance-driven” culture and lead the diversified, international company of 123,000 employees “authentically, as a young Black woman.”<br />
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Mpumi Madisa

See who made Fortune's annual list highlighting the most powerful women in business based outside the United States.