Vach Pillutla

Chief Executive Officer (CEO)

Al-Ikhsan Sports 

Vach Pillutla, Chief Executive Officer of Al-Ikhsan Sports has more than 26 years of global lifestyle and retail experience having run businesses in different markets across Asia for Global brands like Adidas, Sony Corp, New Balance, VF Corp and Samsonite. He has been instrumental in rolling out over 2500 stores across more than 70 key cities across the world including India, South East Asia, North Asia, Australia, South Africa, Middle East, Europe, USA and even Latin America for these global behemoths. The most interesting facet of his experience is that while he has worked with all these iconic brands, he has always been put into a role which is either about starting a new brand, a new market or a new category for these organizations. He joined as the Chief Executive Officer of Al-Ikhsan Sports, a home-grown Bumiputera sports retailer in January 2017 and over the 4 years has taken Al-Ikhsan Sports to new heights with over 130 stores across 4 different retail concepts – the flagship concept called Al-Ikhsan Sports, Al-Ikhsan Sports Warehouse, Football Republic and Sneaker Street. He was also instrumental in building the E-commerce platform for Al-Ikhsan sports with a vision of making Al-ikhsan.com the #1 sports market-place in Malaysia by end of this year. Today, Al-Ikhsan Sports has more than 30% market-share within Multi-Brand sports retail.

An Indian Passport, permanent residence in Hong Kong and now Malaysia may sound unique to most but it represents the new breed of Indian born business executives who find global homes and lead a seemingly nomadic life working across different cultures and even time-zones. Vach Pillutla took over as the CEO of Al-Ikhsan Sports towards the end of 2016 at a time when there was intense competition within the marketplace and the company was also in a seemingly downward spiral for 4 consecutive years. Over the past 4 years under his leadership, the company sales has grown at a double digit CAGR and 4X EBITDA growth – 2020 was arguably the toughest year for all business leaders over the past 100 years of recorded history but Al-Ikhsan was not able to deliver a reasonably strong cash flow and EBITDA but also pivot into a strong presence on e-commerce through www.al-ikhsan.com as well as WhatsApp shopping / personal shopper program.

According to Vach, “Covid-19 is like a mirror – you end up seeing all that is good, bad and ugly and whether you like it or not, you just have to adapt to the new norms – it will not be the largest or the biggest organizations that survive this but the ones that are most adaptable to the new norms – and that is what my vision for Al-Ikhsan 2.0 is – a fast paced and agile company capable of taking on any number of hurdles and hard-ships“.