CEOs to watch: Why you should keep a close eye on these five Canadian business leaders in 2023

In contrast with today’s economic uncertainty, 2023 is likely to be a swing year of improved business conditions, marked by sharp declines in inflation and borrowing costs. Most economists still expect a mild recession in the first half of 2023. But the year should end on a high note with a return to normal GDP growth.

The CEOs highlighted here have set ambitious 2023 goals for their enterprises. The degree of success they achieve is bound to reflect on the strength of the economy as a whole.

Tracy Robinson, president and CEO, Canadian National Railway Co.

CN’s self-described plan to become “the premier railway of the 21st century” will be led by Tracy Robinson, the first woman to head a major Canadian railway.

Robinson, 57, was a surprise pick for the top job at CN. She toiled for 27 years at CN’s archrival, Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. (CP). And at the time of her CEO appointment at CN in January, Robinson had been out of the rail industry for eight years, as a top executive at pipeline giant TC Energy. Yet Robinson would appear to have the right mix of skills for the task of restoring CN’s reputation as the best-run North American railway. Passed over as CEO at CP for legendary railroader Hunter Harrison, Robinson was recruited by TC Energy, where she ran its core Canadian mainline operations, oversaw the novel transfer of oil shipments to rail from maxed out pipelines, and headed TC’s Coastal GasLink project, which will feed Alberta natural gas to Canada’s first liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal, at Kitimat, B.C.

At CN, Robinson will spend more than $2.4 billion in 2022 alone on upgrading CN’s rail network, an overhaul that will see the replacement of more than 400 kilometres of rail in Canada and the U.S. CN’s improved operating performance in 2022 has seen CN stock gain more than 12 per cent in value during Robinson’s tenure, well ahead of the S&P/TSX Composite Index, which has dropped by four per cent. With her large network of Western Canadian decision-makers, Robinson can bring more balance to a corporate culture at Montreal-based CN that has tilted to Central and Eastern North America.

Seetarama (Swamy) Kotagiri, CEO, Magna International Inc.

After two years of setbacks, Kotagiri’s Magna, one of the world’s leading auto parts makers, will be striving to restore revenues lost in the pandemic era while it endures continued supply chain disruptions and rising cost inputs. That’s obviously a hostile environment for attempted turnarounds.

Magna’s 2021 revenues were 14 per cent below the 2018 peak, and profits were only two-thirds the record marked that year. But Magna has a sizable war chest for acquisitions after being outbid in 2021 in its $3.8-billion takeover offer for Swedish tech firm Veoneer Inc.

Kotagiri, 53, has dipped into that fund to invest $77 million in 2022 in Yulu, an Indian startup with about 10,000 electric two-wheelers in operation. Yulu gives Magna a foothold in the burgeoning market for low emission “micromobility” scooters and bikes favoured by government officials intent on reducing urban emissions. A self-described “tech geek,” Kotagiri joined Magna 24 years ago, soon after he emigrated from India, where he earned his undergraduate degree in engineering in Bangalore, a renowned tech hub. He worked his way up at Magna through its R&D and advanced technology divisions. That makes Kotagiri an ideal ambassador for Magna, as an executive who gets the industry’s desperate need for digitizing and electrifying its vehicles, and who runs the rare parts maker that can incorporate the high-margin products like driver-assistance systems into the powertrain, body structures and other complete systems it supplies to more than 20 of the world’s biggest automakers.

Susan Senecal, CEO, A&W Food Services of Canada

In 2023, Senecal has to rewin the hearts and minds of millennials, who fell away from the 66-year-old chain when it was hit harder than other fast-food operators by the pandemic. A&W’s many shopping centre locations felt the full force of lockdowns, and the chain suffered from its comparative lack of drive-thru locations.

Senecal, a 30-year veteran of A&W, helped develop a socially conscious menu at A&W that eventually saw its roughly 1,000 locations doing more business in Canada than Wendys and Burger King combined prior to the pandemic, trailing only McDonald’s. To achieve her goal of a 25 per cent increase in last year’s $1.6 billion in revenues, Senecal will open 20 to 40 new stores a year despite the recession expected in 2023. Senecal is determined to expand A&W’s presence in Ontario and Quebec from its roots in Western Canada. To win back the millennials, though, A&W will have to market more aggressively its unique menu of beef raised without hormones or steroids, chicken raised without antibiotics, eggs from hens fed a vegetarian diet with no animal byproducts, and organic Fairtrade coffee.

Meanwhile, a socially conscious Gen Z has arrived, with Gen Alpha on the horizon. Senecal’s biggest challenge might be winning those potential new customers without alienating the boomers who gave A&W its first big success in the carhop era of the 1950s and 1960s.

Brian Hannasch, CEO, Alimentation Couche Tard Inc.

Circle K owner Alimentation Couche Tard (ACT) will ramp up its fresh food offerings this year to offset gradually slowing growth in its gasoline sales due to increasing adoption of electric vehicles (EVs).

There is some urgency to this strategy, as ACT’s revenue growth has already stalled. ACT’s revenues of $78.8 billion last year were just slightly ahead of total sales four years ago. ACT became North America’s second-largest convenience store operator as a consolidator, snapping up regional C-store chains across North America and Europe. But ACT has struggled to find remaining big c-store chains to buy after its failed bid last year for French grocery giant Carrefour S.A.

At the same time, though, Hannasch has boosted profits almost 62 per cent since 2018 by generating more profit from ACT’s existing 16,000 stores worldwide. Food has been a key to that, but only accounts for about 11 per cent of ACT’s North American sales. Hannasch wants to more than double that to as much as 25 per cent. That should be doable, given ACT’s success with fresh and prepared foods at its much smaller European division. And Hannasch is enamoured of ACT’s Holiday Stationstores (HS), a Minnesota-based chain that ACT acquired in 2017. HS’s fresh food revenue, at about $500 per day per store, is more than double the average for ACT’s 9,000 North American outlets.

Joanna Griffiths, founder and CEO, Knix Wear Inc.

Griffiths will spend much of 2023 integrating Knix with Stockholm-based Essity, a much larger firm in Knix’s business of health-and-hygiene products for women that acquired a controlling interest in Knix in July 2022.

Griffiths is also intent on expanding Toronto-based Knix into women’s athletic wear, which will put her in competition with the most successful firm in that sector, Vancouver’s much larger Lululemon Athletica Inc. But it took Griffiths, a former media relations and marketing specialist, just nine years to build Knix from scratch into a company that Essity valued at almost $550 million when the Swedish company bought an 80 per cent stake in Knix for almost $440 million. By that point, Griffiths had expanded Knix’s pioneering leak-proof underwear, which is fast replacing disposable liners and pads, into incontinence and maternity products and other apparel.

Griffiths, 38, will have to manage a new trans-Atlantic relationship and keep Knix from getting lost among Essity’s many feminine care and intimate brands. But Griffiths has leverage. In addition to her remaining 20 per cent Knix stake, her firm, by Essity’s assertion, made the Swedish company the world market leader in its field. And Knix has room for expansion in the fast-growing women’s athletic wear market.

While she’ll face competition from larger rivals including Lululemon and Victoria’s Secret Inc., Griffiths managed to fly under the radar in largely creating and dominating a new apparel category. It would seem unwise to bet against her continued success.