Biography | Philipp Navratil — One Exchange Term on Bannerghatta Road

The Indian Institute of Management Bangalore sits on Bannerghatta Road in Bilekahalli, 13 kilometres from the city railway station.

Its own map prints the campus at 12.897604 north, 77.600191 east.

Philipp Navratil spent one exchange term here in 1999–2000, while still enrolled at the University of St. Gallen.

IIM Bangalore said so itself on 4 September 2025, three days after Nestlé named him chief executive.

The institute described the stay as an immersion under a student-exchange partnership with St. Gallen that is still running.

German biographical notes say the same: one semester at IIM Bangalore during the HSG years.

The official Nestlé curriculum vitae omits the Indian term. It lists only St. Gallen, 1996–2001.

The gap is ordinary, not suspicious. Company CVs compress. Campus records keep the semester.

He was then a finance student, not a coffee executive. The later Mexico and Nespresso jobs were fifteen and twenty-four years away.

What the pin records is smaller and earlier: a Swiss undergraduate on a 100-acre campus designed by B. V. Doshi, living the partnership that St. Gallen and IIMB still advertise.

Exchange students at IIMB take postgraduate courses in English. Terms run in trimesters. Hostel rooms are not guaranteed in every term.

None of that is in his later press kit. It is in the school's notice, written after the Vevey announcement, when the institute wanted to claim the alumnus.

The claim is fair. He was here.

A visitor today finds the same Bannerghatta frontage, a named IIMB bus stop, and a second campus planned near Jigani. The 1999 buildings are not a museum of his semester. They are still a working school.

Stand at the gate and the story is only this. Before Nestlé's audit rooms, before Honduras and Mexico, a St. Gallen student crossed to Bengaluru for one term and then went home to finish the licence.

Photo: Magentic Manifestations, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Gaëtan Bally, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.