Tata Sons Ltd. Director R. Gopalakrishnan has been appointed as a Non-executive Director of the board of Hemas Holdings PLC. 
Gopalakrishnan is also Chairman of four Tata companies - Tata Auto-Component Systems Ltd., Rallis India Limited, Metahelix Life Sciences Private Ltd. and Advinus Therapeutics Private Ltd.

He parallely serves as Vice Chairman of Tata Chemicals, a Director of Tata Power and Tata Technologies and is an Independent Director on the boards of the Indian subsidiaries of Akzo Nobel and Castrol India.

Since 1967, Gopalakrishnan has worked as a professional manager: 31 years in Hindustan Unilever and 13 years in TATA.
He studied physics at the University of Calcutta and engineering at IIT Kharagpur before joining Hindustan Unilever as a trainee. He has served Unilever as Chairman of Unilever Arabia, as Managing Director of Brooke Bond Lipton India and as Vice Chairman of Hindustan Lever Limited.
 Gopal is a Past President of the All India Management Association.

In 2007 he authored his first book, ‘The Case of the Bonsai Manager’, published by Penguin India. In 2010, his second book entitled ‘When the Penny Drops’ was also published by Penguin India.He has delivered guest lectures in India and abroad while his articles have been published widely. He has taught a credit course entitled ‘LWNT-Learning What’s Not Taught’ at IIM, Ahmedabad, Great Lakes Institute, Chennai and XIM, Bhubaneshwar.Hemas group is one of the leading conglomerates in Sri Lanka with a focus on five key sectors: FMCG, healthcare, transportation, leisure and power generation.