Sanjay Chowbey and the small things that move a factory

At a trade show in Chicago, Sanjay Chowbey holds up a black T-shirt. The lettering belongs on a concert poster: Metal Mania. Below it, a cutting tool takes the place a guitar might normally occupy. The president and chief executive of Kennametal is smiling. Manufacturing, apparently, is allowed merchandise.

The photograph comes from IMTS 2024, where the company's booth dressed metal cutting in the language of a rock tour. Around it were demonstrations, machinery and tools for making things that have to work. Aerospace components. Transportation equipment. Energy systems. The shirt was the joke; the tolerances were serious.

It makes a useful introduction to Chowbey. His professional world is full of objects that rarely receive a standing ovation. Pumps, fueling equipment, wheel-service machines, industrial motion systems and cutting tools have figured in his career. Their contribution becomes conspicuous when something stops. His work has repeatedly involved the less glamorous question of how to keep it going.

Two engineering degrees, then the business of making things

Chowbey's education follows a route from India to the United States: a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from B.I.T. in Sindri, then a master's in the same subject from Tennessee Tech University. He later earned an MBA at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, graduating in 2003.

Engineering and management can approach a factory from different ends. One asks how a component behaves; the other asks what it costs to make, sell and support it. Chowbey's subsequent appointments brought those questions together. His responsibilities have crossed operations, sales, marketing, finance and strategy. The machinery changed; the need to make the whole enterprise function remained.

Before Gilbarco Veeder-Root, he spent more than twelve years at ArvinMeritor and Arvin Industries. His roles included director of operations and general manager. That work brought him into contact with automotive parts customers and retailers including Sears, Pep Boys and AutoZone, along with customers in Asia, the Middle East and Australia. Long before his current title, he was working across the distance between a factory and the people buying its output.

A career in the things that must keep running

At Gilbarco Veeder-Root, a supplier of technology to the petroleum industry, Chowbey spent six years before being named president of Hennessy Industries in December 2012. In his final two years at Gilbarco, he had led its commercial and industrial business unit, handling sales, marketing and business development. Hennessy made wheel-service equipment. It was a different part of the workshop, with familiar demands on delivery and service.

Over more than eleven years at Danaher and Fortive, his responsibilities grew to include the presidency of Thomson Industries. His next change of scene was considerable: TE Connectivity's SubCom business, which supplied subsea communications infrastructure. He led that business during 2017 and 2018. An executive résumé can make such a move look like a neat change of company name. Wheel equipment and undersea connectivity are rather different things to explain at dinner.

In July 2019 he joined Flowserve as president of Aftermarket Services & Solutions. The assignment covered growth, service delivery, quality and the use of technology for customers. Previously installed equipment was central to the opportunity: a sale creates a long relationship when the buyer needs the machinery to keep performing.

The business he led there was worth $1.2 billion. Its scale matters, but so does its character. Aftermarket services demand attention to what happens after the celebratory purchase order. A customer's machine has to earn its place every working day. That is a useful background for selling tools whose value is ultimately judged on somebody else's production floor.

First, learn the factory

Kennametal hired Chowbey to run Metal Cutting effective June 14, 2021. Christopher Rossi, then chief executive, wanted him to turn modernized manufacturing processes into growth, market-share gains and improved financial performance through the economic cycle. The factories had been changed. His assignment was to make the changes count commercially.

Chowbey's own announcement of joining the company was practical: he was spending time getting to know customers and team members in US locations, with global visits to follow. Later that year he described touring plants in Bengaluru, meeting management and production teams, and taking part in the ribbon cutting for a quality laboratory.

These are small episodes beside an appointment announcement. They also show how the business was introduced to him: through people, equipment and customer requirements. A quality laboratory is a particularly apt stop for someone selling precision. The promise made in a sales conversation eventually has to survive measurement.

In November 2022 he and Kennametal India managing director Vijaykrishnan Venkatesan inaugurated a new inserts facility in Bengaluru. It consolidated production processes previously spread across multiple units. The changes included advanced equipment, lean processes and workforce training, with the aim of improving quality, consistency and lead times while adding capacity for demand in Asia Pacific.

It was a physical expression of the task Rossi had described. Modernization had to become a product arriving as promised. The cutting insert may be small, but the chain of decisions behind it runs through buildings, equipment, skills and scheduling.

Eleven days into the job

In March 2024, Kennametal's board unanimously chose Chowbey to succeed Rossi. He would take over on June 1. By then the company credited his Metal Cutting tenure with customer growth, wider operating margins, improved employee engagement and the launch of more than twenty products.

During the transition, he visited plants in Rogers, Arkansas, and Huntsville, Alabama, with colleague Franklin Cardenas. His public account thanked the teams for their hospitality and described learning more about the different end markets Kennametal served. He was about to become responsible for businesses beyond the segment he knew.

On May 26, a tornado damaged the Rogers facility, forcing a shutdown. On June 11, eleven days after Chowbey became chief executive, Kennametal announced that operations had resumed. He credited the local team and expert help from across the organization, saying employees had worked around the clock to restart safely and meet customer expectations.

The episode puts a concrete event beside the corporate phrase “operational excellence.” Here was a plant he had recently visited, an interruption no production schedule could politely accommodate, and a workforce getting operations moving again. His public emphasis fell on the people doing that work. A new chief executive's calendar does not always respect the distinction between settling in and getting on with it.

The arithmetic of getting better

Chowbey organized his agenda around growth, continuous improvement and portfolio optimization. In a January 2025 interview, he described leadership in terms of a clear strategic course and effective teams. He also tied the company’s success to the value it creates for customers.

Continuous improvement can sound pleasantly abstract until it starts changing the arrangement of a workplace. In fiscal 2025, Kennametal recorded more than 35 Kaizen events globally, over 45 projects using core lean tools and participation by more than 400 employees. A photograph shows Chowbey celebrating a completed Kaizen event with employees. The management method had people attached to it.

That year also brought harder choices. Kennametal sold its Goshen, Indiana, subsidiary, closed its Greenfield, Massachusetts, plant and consolidated Barcelona locations. Chowbey's effort to improve the business included decisions about where work should happen and which operations should remain in the portfolio. A plan expressed in three tidy phrases can have complicated consequences on the ground.

The technical agenda widened too. Kennametal added a partnership with Toolpath to existing work with Autodesk and ModuleWorks. Tooling expertise was being connected with digital machining and programming. For a customer, the attraction is practical: reducing friction between deciding what to make and getting the machine to make it correctly.

“When you create value for your customers, you create value for all.”

Sanjay Chowbey · January 2025

When tungsten changes the scoreboard

Fiscal 2026 brought $2.357 billion in sales and adjusted earnings per share of $4.57. The fourth-quarter reported operating margin reached 41.1%. These striking figures require care: approximately $252 million of that quarter's operating-income improvement came from favorable timing between raw-material-related pricing and costs.

Meanwhile, annual free operating cash flow was negative $79 million. Higher tungsten prices increased inventory values, and supplier advances tied up cash. Profit and cash were telling different parts of the same story.

For Chowbey, this makes the leadership test more demanding than a rising earnings figure suggests. Pricing, supply security, working capital and factory performance must hold together. A strong quarter offers evidence of progress; the timing benefit requires readers to distinguish a temporary lift from repeatable improvement. Tungsten has a way of making the fine print the main event.

A wider table, the same practical questions

His responsibilities now extend beyond Kennametal. In March 2025 he joined the National Association of Manufacturers' board, identifying workforce development and manufacturing policy among his priorities. In March 2026, NOV appointed him a director and a member of its audit committee, bringing his industrial operating experience into another company's boardroom.

Those positions connect the concerns of individual plants with the conditions surrounding them: the available workforce, the policy environment and the discipline of overseeing a global business. They also fit a career spent moving between industrial sectors while remaining close to the demands of operating them.

Chowbey and chief financial officer Patrick Watson are scheduled to discuss Kennametal's first-quarter fiscal 2027 results on November 4, 2026. The next set of numbers will add another chapter to the work already underway.

Back in Chicago, the T-shirt offers a less formal image of that work. Metal Mania gives the cutting tool its moment on the front of the shirt. The next morning, somewhere, a customer needs one to do its job. That is where Chowbey's career keeps returning: the point at which the machinery has to perform, and somebody has to make sure it does.