Nicandro Durante has joint Brazilian and Italian nationality. His parents came from the Lazio region near Rome, Italy and moved in the 1950s to Sao Paulo, Brazil during a peak in European migration to South America. Nicandro’s father was connected with the shipping industry then took up a job with Pirelli, the Italian tire company.
Nicandro graduated in business administration and economics from the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. He then spent the next three years working in finance in two Brazilian companies then joined British American Tobacco’s(BAT) Brazilian subsidiary Souza Cruz in 1981. Working for Souza Cruz was a big advantage for Nicandro as the firm had operations from tobacco plantations to producing the final product and delivering it to retail outlets. Thus he experienced and fully understood the whole chain of tobacco production, manufacturing and sales.
His various job positions at BAT enabled him to work in different parts of the world. He moved to the United Kingdom in 1995. Then Nicandro became Finance Director in Hong Kong in 1997. He was back again in Brazil in 2000 as Finance Director and then in 2002 he was appointed President of Souza Cruz.
Nicandro continued to rise up the corporate ladder with more and more important responsibilities. In 2006 he was appointed BAT’s Director of Africa & Middle East. In 2008 he was promoted to COO. In September 2010 he was appointed Chief Executive Designate and the following year became CEO. In the process he became the first non-Briton to run BAT.
While the company is based in the United Kingdom it makes less than 1 percent of its sales in that country. Thus having someone not from that place isn’t a disadvantage at all since BAT does sells it products in 180 countries.
The avid marathoner, Nicandro runs one of the largest tobacco companies in the world. There is a lot of controversy regarding the tobacco industry, Nicandro himself smokes cigars and believes at the end of the day it’s all a matter of personal choice.
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