Background
Cooper grew up in Kingston-Upon-Thames, Surrey, in a family where "money was stretched".
Cooper grew up in Kingston-Upon-Thames, Surrey, in a family where "money was stretched".
She was educated at the nearby Tiffin Girls" School, an all-girls" grammar school, and later gained a bachelor"s degree in mathematics and statistics from Bristol University.
She is currently the chief executive officer (Chief Executive Officer) of Imperial Tobacco, the world’s fourth-largest tobacco company as measured by market share. After she gained her degree she spent a gap year teaching in Kenya on a voluntary basis. Cooper went to work for accountancy firm Deloitte, Haskins & Sells in Bristol as an auditor.
This company later became PricewaterhouseCoopers, where she worked in acquisitions and strategy planning.
She joined Imperial Tobacco in 1999 as group finance manager and was promoted to group financial controller in 2001. She rose to chief operating officer in 2009, before becoming chief executive officer in March 2010.
Cooper took over from Gareth Davis, who had held the position for fourteen years. Tobacco has been traditional in the way it has operated.
We want to move from being a tobacco manufacturer to a FMCG company."
Cooper has been a non-executive director of Inchcape plc since July 2009.
In October 2012, Cooper noted that she and Burberry’s Angela Ahrendts were the only two female Chief executive officers running FTSE 100 Index companies. Despite this, she has stressed that she does not support the introduction of quotas intended to increase female participation in boardrooms. In February 2013, she was assessed by Woman"s Hour on British Broadcasting Corporation Radio 4 as one of the 100 most powerful women in the United Kingdom.