Ranked: Billion-pound British bosses

Welcome to Business Leader’s inaugural list of the chief executives who have added the most value to Britain’s biggest public companies. We have put together this list to highlight some of the extraordinary stories in British business. We celebrate the founders and CEOs of tech start-ups for raising millions of pounds and hitting milestone valuations, but we rarely do the same for the bosses of the biggest companies.

Yet leadership at the top of the FTSE doesn’t just shape company culture or steer strategy, it moves markets, changes industries and affects lives. We have identified nearly 100 active chief executives of FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 companies who have added £1bn or more to the value of their business since they took charge.

We have made Tufan Erginbilgiç at Rolls-Royce our CEO of the Year for the remarkable progress the business has achieved in 2025 and since he took charge. The chief executive who has added the most value overall is Pascal Soriot at AstraZeneca, who has turned the drug maker into Britain’s largest listed company since he became boss in 2012.

Other names on the list include Amanda Blanc at Aviva, Kevin Rountree at Games Workshop and Stuart Machin of Marks & Spencer.

Working with analysts at Argus Vickers, we looked at the market capitalisations of FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 companies when the current chief executive was hired, what it was on October 31, 2025 (the most recent data available) and how it has changed in the last year. The data was analysed to find who has added the most value across both their tenure and in 2025.

This is more than a ranking. It reveals the behaviours and patterns behind the UK’s most successful corporate leadership. At a time when scrutiny of CEO pay, performance and impact is intensifying, this list highlights the leaders demonstrating measurable results.

While Erginbilgiç of Rolls is our CEO of the year, you can see parts of his transformation playbook in the achievements of other high-performing CEOs on our list. Machin, for instance, has added billions of pounds to the value of Marks & Spencer since becoming chief executive in 2022.

His revival of the 141-year-old retailer rests on a clear strategy and an unflinching assessment of the challenges it faced. Machin summarises his strategy as “protect the magic and modernise the rest”. The phrase struck a chord with staff when he first used it, according to an interview he gave to the Business Leader Podcast in early 2025.

“Protecting the magic is to bring to life the heritage of Marks & Spencer,” he explains. “That’s the same whether it’s a store or whether it’s a product – quality, innovation and making sure it is good value. Modernise the rest is the significant transformation that we’ve been going through and will be for the next few years.”

Machin was able to drive change at M&S because the business was prepared to accept the problems and challenges it faced. This willingness to confront reality was implanted in company culture by chairman Archie Norman, who joined in 2017 and hired Machin.

A veteran of corporate turnarounds, Norman pledged to bring the “unvarnished truth” to M&S, a business long reluctant to face its failings. “What Archie did, which is what Archie is famous for, is to allow you to just talk the truth,” Machin says. “It’s so powerful being able to get everything on the table.”

Kingfisher, the owner of B&Q and Screwfix, has added more than 25 per cent to its market capitalisation since Thierry Garnier joined as chief executive. His turnaround of one of the biggest retailers in Europe centred on shifting power from head office and handing it to store managers.

“The mood was pretty low because the balance went too far on the centralisation piece and doing everything together,” Garnier says. He spent his first weeks with the top 120 people in hour-long, one-to-one meetings.

“You come with intuition and then you fine-tune your intuition through listening and talking to people,” he explains. “I think after two months I had a view on where to go. Then you have to do that with a team. You need to recruit people, you need to convince people. That takes a bit more.”

Like Erginbilgiç at Rolls, Garnier stresses the importance of speed. “If you want to go fast, you need to empower your team,” he says. “You don’t do things fast if you do that yourself and you want to control everything.”

Kingfisher has 73,000 employees and 1,900 stores around the world, so moving with speed is difficult. That requires something else, according to Garnier – a tolerance for mistakes.

“It’s around how you manage the mistakes, and it starts from you,” he says. “There are many stories I could recall from the early days when a team tried very hard to do something but it still ended with a mistake. You need people to understand that it’s OK – it showed you are taking some risks. When the mistake happens, how personally you manage it sets the tone for the entire organisation.”

He points to two examples: Kingfisher’s unsuccessful small-store trial inside Asda supermarkets and its purchase of NeedHelp, a tradesperson-booking platform. “Even at group level we make mistakes, but we try to do things fast and correct the mistakes fast,” Garnier adds.

Another chief executive on our list is Nathan Coe of Auto Trader. He has overseen an extraordinary reinvention of the business, which is an online marketplace for cars. When Coe joined in 2007, Auto Trader made about 60 per cent of its revenue from its print magazine and employed 4,000 people.

Today, the magazine no longer exists and the workforce numbers just 1,200 people. Yet the company’s valuation has risen from £1.35bn to a high of around £7bn in May this year, though it has since fallen back.

Coe, who became chief executive in 2020, describes himself as “someone that likes a lot of change”, a trait he admits can be “exhausting for those around him”. Auto Trader’s early strategic bet was “very simple”, he explains. It was that the future was online, not in print. That bet was correct, but it has been a difficult journey to get there.

“We never anticipated closing the magazines,” he says. “I don’t think anyone would sign off that business case, to be honest, because it looks horrendous. Making that transition is horrendous. It is really, really hard work. It involves a bold strategic play and putting at risk your core business.”

Coe recalls telling staff at a print centre in Wales that their site would probably close. “People cried because they’ve been working together for years. It felt like they were losing friends that had become like family. And they were so good about it. Their only question was: ‘Could we have a copy of the final magazine?’ It was absolutely heart-wrenching.”

Coe’s reflections reveal the reality of transformation: strategy is only a small part of it. “If strategy is more than 10 per cent, I’d be very surprised,” he says. “It is all about execution.”

These are the 10 CEOs across the FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 who have added more than £1bn in value since they took charge, according to data from Argus Vickers. See the full list of 96 in Business Leader Magazine.