MUMBAI: In a surprise move, Star India has appointed Amit Chopra as the network sales head to replace Kevin Vaz, who was helming the position since November 2009.

Chopra?s mandate will be to leverage the skills of the sales team at Star India to fuel aggressive growth in the business.

The realignment will see Kevin Vaz move to lead the English channels? cluster of Star India. Kevin will also continue to steer Star Jalsha and Jalsha Movies as their General Manager and Business Head.

Interestingly, Star had appointed Chopra in December last year to steer the group?s sports strategy. The India operations of ESPN Star Sports (ESS) have come under Star post its complete takeover by News Corp.

Before joining Star, Chopra was the CEO of Hindustan Media Ventures Limited (HMVL). An Engineer from IIT Kharagpur and an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad, Chopra has spent 12 years in FMCG in Hindustan Unilever in a variety of marketing and sales assignments.

It also needs to be noted that the English channels cluster of Star was headed by Saurabh Yagnik, who quit the company in November last year to join Multi Screen Media?s (MSM) English movie channel Pix.

Vaz, who joined Star in 1996 as an ad sales executive, rose through the ranks to become the network ad sales head of the company. The soft spoken ad sales executive has been with the company for almost 17 years now.