Colgate-Palmolive (India) on Thursday named Prabha Narasimhan, the former executive director of Hindustan Unilever Ltd (HUL), as its new chief executive officer and managing director.

She will replace Ram Raghavan who has been promoted as president, enterprise oral care, Colgate Palmolive Company. Raghavan will be based out of the company’s headquarters in New York.

On Wednesday, HUL had announced two key appointments to its management committee that included Madhusudhan Rao and Deepak Subramanian.

The FMCG giant, which competes with Colgate in the oral care space, had said that Subramanian will take over from Prabha Narasimhan, who has decided to leave the company to pursue an “external opportunity”.

In a regulatory filing to the stock exchanges, Colgate-Palmolive said its “Nomination & Remuneration Committee (NRC) at its meeting on Thursday has identified Prabha Narasimhan as managing director and CEO of Colgate-Palmolive (India) Limited and has recommended her name to the board of directors for her appointment effective from September 1, 2022.

Before joining HUL, Narasimhan was the general manager-strategy at Madura Garments. She joined the Unilever group firm in 2006 as its regional marketing manager.

According to the HUL website, she moved to the home care role in early 2020.

As executive director of home care, her key responsibilities included creating and delivering the strategy for the division, including top line and bottom line delivery.

The company said under her leadership in 2016-19, its skin care business delivered a spectacular market-beating growth rate. This was achieved by a broad-based performance delivery across all brands and sub-segments.

Shares of Colgate-Palmolive (India) on Thursday closed with gains of 3.37 per cent at Rs 1,497.25 on the BSE, ahead of the announcement.