CAREERS: Ogilvy India veteran heads to Beijing in IBM role

In his Beijing-based position, Vasudevan will oversee all communications for the IBM brand in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

He partially fills the managing director's post left vacant by Robert Swartz, who recently relocated to New York to take up a senior position in the WPP network's worldwide IBM brand services team.

Shenan Chuang, the current group chairperson of Ogilvy Beijing, will take over Swartz' other responsibilities as acting managing director.

Vasudevan is a 15-year Ogilvy India veteran who set up Ogilvy's IBM team in the country in 1994. Five years later, he established OgilvyInteractive, before taking charge of all OgilvyOne operations for India and later South Asia.

He said he took up the new post because of the opportunity of working on the IBM business in such a fast-growing market as China. "It was too great an opportunity to pass up."

Vasudevan said his main priority would be to build on IBM's market share in China by promoting the e-business capabilities of the brand.

"To do that, we continuously need to find and develop the best talent here in China. And then we need to make use of the best thinking from around the world and in the region," he said.

During his time at Ogilvy India, Vasudevan worked in a number of different roles, including advertising, one-to-one marketing and interactive media, handling a range of top brands such as Cadbury's, Pond's, American Express, Seagram and Nestle.