Please Share:: 
India Equity Research Reports, IPO and Stock News
Visit http://indiaer.blogspot.com/ for complete details �� ��
Excerpts from IIFL’s interview
with Anil Gupta, Joint MD & Qimat Rai Gupta,
Chairman & MD, Havells
Anil Gupta, the MD of Havells India is a man with a mission: to
cover the entire gamut of Indian consumers’ electrical needs through
his company. He graduated in economics from Sriram College of
Commerce, Delhi University and obtained an MBA from Wake
University, North Carolina. But the best of his education came during
his apprenticeship under his father, when he joined the senior Mr
Gupta’s business at the age of 24.
A health enthusiast Mr Gupta spends religiously spends an hour daily
in the gym keeping fit. His consuming passion outside work is music
and he is a vocalist by training and continues to train in Hindustani
classical music. He feels strongly about causes like education and
child hunger and has been active through Havells in giving back to
society. At his behest, Havells is expanding its program of providing
daily mid-day meals to 15,000 students to 50,000 daily in order to
even better serve the community.
Mr Gupta lists the integration of Sylvania as the biggest challenge
and learning opportunity he has faced in his life. He takes great pride
in the Havells brand and channel strengths and feels that those are
the biggest entry barriers for an incumbent.
Qimat Rai Gupta started his business selling electrical wires and
cables from a small shop in Delhi. Fifty years on, at 84, he is just as
enthusiastic about his business as the day he started. Even today his
motto in life is “Business, Business and Business”. A through and
through family man he also retains a healthy interest in Cricket and
movies. Having started at the age of 21 as an electrical items trader
in Delhi in 1958, Mr Gupta acquired the Havells brand name in 1971
and formally incorporated in 1983. As the business becomes world
scale, the entire management team looks up to him as a mentor.
The current MD Anil Gupta is his son, who believes his father is the
principal influence in his life and attributes most of his business
learning to him.
A firm believer in “one step at a time” he stops short of setting
numerical benchmarks for his company’s aspirations and feels that
the focus on basics like customer satisfaction that has served the
company so well will be pointers to future course of strategic choices
for the company.
What are the key barriers to entry in your business?
Anil Gupta: The key barriers are brand and channel. In the
categories in which we operate, brand franchise and trust are of
utmost importance. It takes a number of years for a consumer to
change his preference from one brand to another. The second key
factor is product availability, in which distribution channels plays a
very important role
What are the key risks in your business and how do you
manage them?
Anil Gupta: The biggest risk is competition—the market is moving
very fast in terms of technology, product range, costs, branding,
reach… you name it. As Andy Grove of Intel said, only the paranoid
survive. No one can say they are comfortable, as everyone is always
at risk in one aspect or another.
Qimat Rai Gupta: We need to be ever watchful, so we have formed
a core thinking group to keep abreast of changes in market and
competition trends to take corrective action as needed from time to
time.
If you were to correct one mistake in your career, what would
that be?
Anil Gupta: The way we managed Sylvania was the biggest mistake
we made. We did not integrate the two companies for the first one
and half years after our acquisition; if I had the power, I would go
back to 2007 and change that. We lost two years in that, and that
meant we were caught unprepared when Europe was struck by a
recession in 2008. I think the company lost money because of that.
We also lost credibility. But it was a big learning exercise; if it were
not for that bad patch, maybe we would not even have learnt how to
manage in a crisis, because in India in the last 20 years of my
career, we had never seen a crisis.
What was the thinking behind the Sylvania acquisition? Does
the rationale for that acquisition still hold?
Anil Gupta: Ten yeas ago, when multinationals in our field started
arriving in India, we decided that we had to invest in our
manufacturing practices, make them world-scale as well as worldclass
in technology. So in 2000, we started investing heavily into our
manufacturing setup and product quality, to protect our standing in
the Indian market. When we started doing that, we realised that we
had to make products comparable with international standards. As
our quality improved, overseas companies with major brands started
outsourcing their manufacturing to us. As we did that, our
aspirations rose: if we could manufacture for someone else, why not
for our own brand? In 2003-4, we started putting in a lot of
investment into expanding into export markets, putting up offices in
various locations, but we knew that not having a big brand was a
limitation. With Sylvania, the biggest advantage was that it was an
established brand. Plus, it had a distribution channel across 50
countries, and this clinched it for us; otherwise, we would have had
to acquire multiple companies across countries. Sylvania was one
company which was available at a price, but with access to various
markets—very strong European markets, in addition to the fastgrowing
LatAm market. So we decided to use this channel, brandnew
as it was, to sell more of Havells products. That rationale still
holds true and now that is bringing success because we have
integrated the companies. Earlier, we were treating them as two
separate companies, as though Sylvania was more of a financial
investment, whereas Havells was our own company. I think that
changed in the last two years. That was our biggest learning: any
company that you acquire should be properly integrated, and that
comes with experience.
Qimat Rai Gupta: When we first ventured into exports, we realised
that an established brand with top-of-mind recall in its country is key
to penetrating foreign markets. This was the key attraction in
Sylvania.
India Equity Research Reports, IPO and Stock News
Visit http://indiaer.blogspot.com/ for complete details �� ��
Excerpts from IIFL’s interview
with Anil Gupta, Joint MD & Qimat Rai Gupta,
Chairman & MD, Havells
Anil Gupta, the MD of Havells India is a man with a mission: to
cover the entire gamut of Indian consumers’ electrical needs through
his company. He graduated in economics from Sriram College of
Commerce, Delhi University and obtained an MBA from Wake
University, North Carolina. But the best of his education came during
his apprenticeship under his father, when he joined the senior Mr
Gupta’s business at the age of 24.
A health enthusiast Mr Gupta spends religiously spends an hour daily
in the gym keeping fit. His consuming passion outside work is music
and he is a vocalist by training and continues to train in Hindustani
classical music. He feels strongly about causes like education and
child hunger and has been active through Havells in giving back to
society. At his behest, Havells is expanding its program of providing
daily mid-day meals to 15,000 students to 50,000 daily in order to
even better serve the community.
Mr Gupta lists the integration of Sylvania as the biggest challenge
and learning opportunity he has faced in his life. He takes great pride
in the Havells brand and channel strengths and feels that those are
the biggest entry barriers for an incumbent.
Qimat Rai Gupta started his business selling electrical wires and
cables from a small shop in Delhi. Fifty years on, at 84, he is just as
enthusiastic about his business as the day he started. Even today his
motto in life is “Business, Business and Business”. A through and
through family man he also retains a healthy interest in Cricket and
movies. Having started at the age of 21 as an electrical items trader
in Delhi in 1958, Mr Gupta acquired the Havells brand name in 1971
and formally incorporated in 1983. As the business becomes world
scale, the entire management team looks up to him as a mentor.
The current MD Anil Gupta is his son, who believes his father is the
principal influence in his life and attributes most of his business
learning to him.
numerical benchmarks for his company’s aspirations and feels that
the focus on basics like customer satisfaction that has served the
company so well will be pointers to future course of strategic choices
for the company.
What are the key barriers to entry in your business?
Anil Gupta: The key barriers are brand and channel. In the
categories in which we operate, brand franchise and trust are of
utmost importance. It takes a number of years for a consumer to
change his preference from one brand to another. The second key
factor is product availability, in which distribution channels plays a
very important role
What are the key risks in your business and how do you
manage them?
Anil Gupta: The biggest risk is competition—the market is moving
very fast in terms of technology, product range, costs, branding,
reach… you name it. As Andy Grove of Intel said, only the paranoid
survive. No one can say they are comfortable, as everyone is always
at risk in one aspect or another.
Qimat Rai Gupta: We need to be ever watchful, so we have formed
a core thinking group to keep abreast of changes in market and
competition trends to take corrective action as needed from time to
time.
If you were to correct one mistake in your career, what would
that be?
Anil Gupta: The way we managed Sylvania was the biggest mistake
we made. We did not integrate the two companies for the first one
and half years after our acquisition; if I had the power, I would go
back to 2007 and change that. We lost two years in that, and that
meant we were caught unprepared when Europe was struck by a
recession in 2008. I think the company lost money because of that.
We also lost credibility. But it was a big learning exercise; if it were
not for that bad patch, maybe we would not even have learnt how to
manage in a crisis, because in India in the last 20 years of my
career, we had never seen a crisis.
What was the thinking behind the Sylvania acquisition? Does
the rationale for that acquisition still hold?
Anil Gupta: Ten yeas ago, when multinationals in our field started
arriving in India, we decided that we had to invest in our
manufacturing practices, make them world-scale as well as worldclass
in technology. So in 2000, we started investing heavily into our
manufacturing setup and product quality, to protect our standing in
the Indian market. When we started doing that, we realised that we
had to make products comparable with international standards. As
our quality improved, overseas companies with major brands started
outsourcing their manufacturing to us. As we did that, our
aspirations rose: if we could manufacture for someone else, why not
for our own brand? In 2003-4, we started putting in a lot of
investment into expanding into export markets, putting up offices in
various locations, but we knew that not having a big brand was a
limitation. With Sylvania, the biggest advantage was that it was an
established brand. Plus, it had a distribution channel across 50
countries, and this clinched it for us; otherwise, we would have had
to acquire multiple companies across countries. Sylvania was one
company which was available at a price, but with access to various
markets—very strong European markets, in addition to the fastgrowing
LatAm market. So we decided to use this channel, brandnew
as it was, to sell more of Havells products. That rationale still
holds true and now that is bringing success because we have
integrated the companies. Earlier, we were treating them as two
separate companies, as though Sylvania was more of a financial
investment, whereas Havells was our own company. I think that
changed in the last two years. That was our biggest learning: any
company that you acquire should be properly integrated, and that
comes with experience.
Qimat Rai Gupta: When we first ventured into exports, we realised
that an established brand with top-of-mind recall in its country is key
to penetrating foreign markets. This was the key attraction in
Sylvania.
No comments:
Post a Comment