CIO and Head of Real Estate
ABB Group
Haider Rashid is Chief Information Officer (CIO) and head of Real Estate for the ABB Group. In these roles, he manages over US$2 billion of costs and around 5,000 internal and outsourced employees. Haider gained an honours degree in Accounting and Finance from the University of Lancaster, England in 1981. His early career was in a number of sales and marketing functions for the ICI group in Pakistan, and then the Hoechst AG group, culminating in his appointment as country head for the company’s agricultural business in Pakistan.
In 1997, Haider joined the Hoechst AG Corporate Center as head of controlling for the group. In this capacity, he also participated in – and led – several board level M&A and strategy projects, including the merger of Hoechst AG and Rhone Poulenc of France to create Aventis. Haider then moved to the Agriculture business of Aventis as a member of the Aventis CropScience Executive Committee, responsible for the integration programme. At the same time, he was CIO of the company.
In February 2003, he joined ABB as Group CIO. Since then he has led a major consolidation of the Group’s IS activities and the application environment and involved in a number of the Group's strategic initiatives. His external responsibilities include membership of the IBM Board of Advisors and the Executive Committee of the Roundtable for Digital Strategies founded by the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Haider was recently named by Information Week magazine in their list of Top 50 global CIOs.