Friday, August 31, 2012

INDIA’S 100 MOST PROFITABLE COMPANIES

Competition today has forced organisations to overlook the importance of values, ethics, credible leadership and corporate governance. they simply hinge their hopes on luck. wrong. Dr. Jamshed Jiji Irani, Director of Tata Sons and Chairman of the Board of Governors, IIM-Lucknow, writes about those elements, which if considered first, would result in fair profits.

Profit is about “Corporate Governance”
Nowadays, “Good Corporate Governance” is very much in the news, and is being demanded from various quarters. There is a drive towards the “Triple-Bottom-Line”. The practice of “Triple-Bottom-Line” – financial, social and environmental – is being taken up by the more enlightened business houses in India and abroad.

The opposite of “Good Corporate Governance” is apathy. Unfortunately, too many of us take the easy alternative under the pretext that, I on my own, cannot make a difference. The truth is exactly the opposite. Even a drop in the ocean can make a difference. Very often, this attitude of apathy is an excuse for not taking a correct stand or for avoiding an initiative to fight corruption.

Another reason which is given for not taking appropriate action, is that we are restricted by the prevailing laws of the land. Once again, nothing can be further from the truth. It can be demonstrated that even under the prevailing laws, which in some cases are definitely restrictive and archaic. It is possible with vision and determination to take actions which can have far reaching impacts.

Profit is about “Leadership with Trust”
The right leader can make a difference. We do not have to go back to the very obvious examples in the political history of great men such as Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. Even in a much more restrictive sphere of industry and civic administration, there have been very significant examples in the recent past where one person at the helm, has made a tremendous difference on the performance of an entire organisation. These people gave back to the organisations which gave them respect and made them feel proud to be what they were.

It is well accepted that those organisations and corporations which create ownership and a feeling of belonging in the rank and file, are the best able to stand up to the competitive environments in which businesses find themselves today. The crucial feature is how does one build this culture in a world which is today awash with cynicism and skepticism. Such attitudes do not help any one or any organisation to get ahead and succeed. Therefore, this ‘trust-deficit’ has to be taken head on. The Tata organisation is built on trust, and its motto is “Leadership with Trust”.



          
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Thursday, August 30, 2012

“WE MADE A MISTAKE IN READING THE MARKET...”

Maruti’s market share and stock price has taken a beating in the recent past; blame competition for it. Shinzo Nakanishi, MD, Maruti Suzuki India, explains the comeback plan of the company to B&E.

B&E: The company’s market share has fallen below 50% for the first time in its 25 year-old history. Did you go wrong somewhere in reading the market?
Shinzo Nakanishi (SN): It is our aim that by the end of this fiscal, we will capture over 50% of the domestic passenger car market in India. Apart from the recently launched Alto K10, the company has also introduced five CNG models in its portfolio and the automatic A-Star, which will bring in additional volumes. We expected the market to grow at a rate of 12-15% over the past year, but it has grown by 30%. While we were selling almost all our models in the domestic market, the boom in the industry came as a boon for auto majors who had idle capacity. We made a mistake in reading the market growth.

B&E: The royalty payments that Maruti made to Suzuki for the first quarter of FY2010-11 is considered a big party spoiler. Do you believe that the level of royalty will go up in quarters to follow, from the current rate of 5.1%?
SN: I don’t think so. The amount of royalty will stay around the same level in the coming quarters as well. However, as the dependence of Maruti on Suzuki as far as its technology and brands are concerned is very high, it is difficult to lower it.
 

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Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Picture perfect?

Image is to the mind what perception is to the soul. Have movie-makers ended up distorting both in an attempt to deliver ‘happy’ stories?

You’ve got mail. Every time these words appeared on Kathleen Kelly’s computer screen, she got butterflies in her stomach in anticipation of the words (from her mysterious friend) that lay unread in that mail. But this together with the background song ‘You’re a Dream to me’ often leaves the audience with the same feeling too, especially those who thrive on sweet nothings! Whether it is the perfectly-directed chemistry of love and companionship between Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in movies like You’ve Got Mail and When Harry met Sally or the extremely optimistic plot performed to perfection by Julia Roberts and Richard Gere in flicks like Pretty Woman and Runaway Bride, romantic Hollywood flicks leave many mesmerised and hopeful (rather adamant) of true (rather perfect) love in their lives too. A recent Australian survey released by Warner Home Video backs this observation. Almost half of the respondents blamed the ‘inevitable happy endings’ of rom-coms to have ‘ruined their view of an ideal relationship.’

Well, with this research, let’s not assume that the Australians are extra-soppy! Hollywood and Bollywood (largely) have immensely influenced Indian minds and hearts too. “The image of a good relationship in the minds of most of the couples I meet stems from Hindi films. The influence is so deep that subconsciously the expectations from each other are from the perfect relationship portrayed in movies like Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (DDLJ). In fact, many girls look for the boyish charm of Shahrukh Khan (of DDLJ) in their partner and I often end up telling them how Shahrukh in reality must not be like that all the time! In the beginning of the relationship, all is hunky-dory but as monotony sets in, (which is absolutely normal) people tend to overreact since the ‘perfect picture’ starts to dissolve,” says Dr. Nisha Khurana, a Delhi based Marriage Counselor.



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Friday, August 24, 2012

Think before you Tweet!

Ever since actor Shahid Kapur underestimated his popularity and revealed his hotel and location in Edinburgh on Twitter, he has been having a difficult time. Even father Pankaj Kapur, who is directing him in the movie Mausam, is unhappy with the series of events since the hotel and shooting sites have been swarming with people. Seems that the effects of unintentional badmaashi are beyond repair now…


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Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Of blood bags and an American dream!

His company came out with an IPO even before it rolled out the first medical device. Then, he had two choices – to make his dimes count or be annihilated. Luckily, his bet paid-off! Today, his outfit named Poly Medicure, is the largest listed medical devices manufacturer in India. B&E’s Steven Philip Warner and Amir Moin catch up with the risk-taker, as he lets-off some nostalgia at his oldest manufacturing plant in Haryana

When Himanshu Baid started off, he was not in an appropriate cash position to start a medical devices manufacturing business – what he had was just not enough. He was forced to borrow capital from his family and friends, roped-in banks and NBFCs and went public. 13 years later, his business is the largest-listed company on BSE (amongst all in the sector). It recorded a gross profit margin of 51.31%, much higher than the average of the sector (22.59%). With a revenue per employee record of Rs.1.44 million in FY2009, Baid, MD of Poly Medicure, who is also one of the largest shareholder of his company (8.83% stake held directly and another 4.32% indirectly), dreams to take this owner-cum-management entity to newer highs. With forays into the Chinese and Egyptian market already, he has his eyes set on his next target – the mature American market! Excerpts from the interview follow: B&E: 1997 was a time when everyone else was investing in the booming IT industry. Why did you choose the medical equipments business, even over the-then growing generic pharma?
Himanshu Baid (HB): When we started, my family was into the business of plastics. So this became a low-risk extension. The knowledge of that business helped us to set up this project. We had an experience in plastic-moulding. So medical equipments happened naturally.

B&E: You exist in an extremely fragmented industry, where you can at best enjoy a small pie of the overall business. Even the ratio of your revenues to the industry’s leads us to a figure which is less than 1%! Your explaination...
HB: We operate purely in a medical device segment. The industry figure that you are talking about is approximately $2.5 billion, which includes every single device that can be “quoted” directly or indirectly as a “medical equipment”. Out of this, we are mainly into products that are of one time usage in hospitals. This segment is roughly around Rs.30 billion in India. Now out of this Rs.30 billion market, the syringe category accounts for atleast Rs.10 billion. And we are not into syringes. So if you zero-down to the 78 products that we manufacture, we are left with a total market of less than Rs.10 billion, of which, we have a share of about 20%. That’s big.


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Tuesday, August 21, 2012

A mysterious and fascinating set of islands lie in the Bay of Bengal, ready to give your most adventurous imagination wings…

The people of Andaman, or to be more precise the tribes of Andaman, are the most mysterious element of the culture and history of the place. Precisely because little is known about them and their nature and way of life varies from one island to another. There are about 12 such tribal units, among them the major ones being the Jarawas, Shompen, Nicobarese, The Great Andmanis, The Little Andamanis, The Onges and the Sentinelese.

The origins of these tribes have been difficult to establish, although the most accepted theory remains that the Negritos made their way into the islands from the east in Burma. The Jarawas were the tribe that I had a glimpse of while on a bus to Baratang. I was told immediately that it was a matter of extreme fortune that I managed to see a tribal ‘live’ and not in a painting in the museum. Apparently, most of the tribes remain notoriously elusive and cut-off from civilisation. The Jarawas, who inhabit middle Andaman and South Andaman, are of Negroid origin and are mostly hunters and foragers. On the Nicobar Island live the Nicobarese, of mongoloid origin, and as legend would have it, they are descendants of an exiled Burmese prince.

This tribe is the most advanced of the lot in the sense that they use modern agricultural and animal rearing methods unlike the other tribes, where the people are mostly hunters and foragers. Then there are the Onges, who live on the Little Andaman and Rutland Islands. Part of the Nicobarese, the Shompen (about 200 of them remain today) live on the Great Nicobar islands.

The Sentinelese are reportedly the fiercest and most evasive of the lot and inhabit the Sentinel Islands. Most of these tribes have little or no contact with the settlers in the island except for the Nicobarese.

Despite the isolation, the aborigines’ right to their resources and way of life has increasingly been under threat for the past few decades, as the influx of settlers has passed on diseases, increased deforestation, and cut-off access to resources (like the Andaman Trunk Road that runs through the Andaman Island that has limited the Jarawas reach into fresh hunting grounds) and posed a threat to these rare communities.

Ultimately, Andaman is about islands. Whether it be the Barren Island, home to the only active volcano in India or Ross Island, once the seat of British power and now a collection of ruins ravaged by time and serving as a grim reminder of how the mighty can fall, every island tells its own story. That is what the essence of these islands is about – fascinating tales and stories. Some are well documented, some perhaps figments of some creative guy’s imagination. But as you look around and explore, you also get to fill up some of the blanks with your own imagination. 


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Tuesday, August 14, 2012

India’s Biggest Wealth Creators Wealth creation beyond market capitalisation

With exclusive interviews and incisive insights, B&E brings the electrifying annual listing of India’s top’ wealth creators during the financial year 2009-2010; companies that gave the largest rise in market capitalisation for their shareholders! By Deepak Ranjan Patra

Do not repeat the tactics which have gained you one victory, but let your methods be regulated by the infinite variety of circumstances.
Sun Tzu c. 490 BC, Chinese military strategist

In this post-recession era, Sun Tzu’s strategy holds a lot more value for all the right logic. Gone are the days when some corporate house could make a grandiose announcement, hype over it through scrappily sassy PR and see investors falling hook, line and sinker for the same, raising their bids for the company’s stocks, which ultimately would end up increasing the company’s market cap to unparalleled highs. There is one critical reason this change occurred. While in the 1980s the biggest participants in the stock investor community were government financial institutions (led by star-eyed bureaucrats who couldn’t understand why pound sterlings were represented as GBP), from the mid 1990s into this decade, the massive majority of investors became what came to be known as FIIs – the brazenly cheeky, impudently crusty, Goldmansquely audacious Foreign Institutional Investors! FIIs came armed with supremely qualified analytical tools that looked through ostentatious corporate window dressing and ensured that market dynamics were driven less by company spiel. So did it mean that finally fundamentals started driving market capitalisations? Baloney! It only meant that FIIs used all technical skulduggery allowed in the trade (including high frequency trading) to book profits, while the common ‘long term’ investor would simply keep waiting – almost moronically – for dividend payouts.

But then, if stock markets are still moving nonsensically without correlation with fundamental strengths of the companies, what in heavens is the justification for this besotted and daffy global infatuation with market capitalisation, where CEOs are recruited and thrown out not on the basis of operational parameters (like sales, cash flows, even profits!) but on the basis of how much they’ve added to the stock market price? For this, you’ll have to go back 40 years, to the year 1970, when an eccentric Einsteinish professor of the University of Chicago – who used to write weekly Newsweek columns – raked up a controversy by saying that any organisation should have only one social objective – increasing financial returns for shareholders! His papers on monetary economics made so much sense that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1976. The corporate world finally came around to accept en masse the primary position of the shareholders’ wealth maximisation postulate – and has never changed since! The iconic Milton Friedman passed away on November 16, 2006, but left a legacy that will live its full cycle through the capitalist era.

Enough said, and enough proven. Now, the winners in absolute market capitalization increase on Indian bourses for the financial year 2009-2010...

B&E Hall of Fame: Synopsis

The table of those who performed at the bourses during the year is led by none other that Reliance Industries (RIL). Mukesh Ambani’s Mumbai Indians might have lost to India Cements (Deccan Chargers) in the IPL3 final, but his company paid back the compliment exponentially. RIL’s market cap jumped 44% or nearly Rs.1.09 trillion (total-float) to beat its India counterparts in terms of absolute rise in market cap. It was closely followed by Tata Consultancy Services (Rs.1.04 trillion) and the public sector mining giant, MMTC, which added Rs.87.7 billion to its value. Meanwhile, if one were to compare these figures with international representations, the scenario in the US market was worth watching as a number of financial giants, which were written off in 2008, rose from the dust. The list of top 10 US wealth creators included as many as four financial services companies including Citigroup, Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase, apart from Bank of America (BoA). BoA added $132 billion to its market valuation, while Apple gained $114 billion.

A Commentary on Domestic Fundamental Growth

By all means, there is no dearth of skills to create wealth in Mukesh Ambani’s camp. And it’s absolutely not surprising that Reliance Industries has once again emerged as B&E’s biggest wealth creator for the financial year 2009-10. Between April 1, 2009 and April 1, 2010, the company’s market cap witnessed a sustained growth from Rs.2.48 trillion to Rs.3.57 trillion. But does this give a true picture? One look at the company’s ‘fundamentals’ and dear Milton would be damned. While we are talking about the company’s growth in terms of market cap, RIL’s profit during last fiscal has grown by a paltry 3.83% to Rs.162.36 billion from Rs.156.37 billion for the previous year. And the year before that had been another dismal performance (2.46% bottom-line growth). The value of the company’s depreciation has more than doubled in the last fiscal to Rs.104 billion from Rs.52 billion a year before. An analyst from Motilal Oswal Securities tells B&E, “Soaring demand and increased activity level in the oil and gas domain have forced a faster depletion in RIL’s reserves; depreciation during the quarter exceeded our estimate, spiking 134.6% year-on-year on account of the additional depreciation of the SEZ refinery and KG-basin gas facility, resulting a drop in its net profit.”

And if you thought market hype was the reason stock prices were going up, one has to mention that despite credible news about new discoveries, the company has provided very little guidance about the exploration/development plans with regard to many of its key blocks like NEC-25. Add to all that the fact that the company’s Gross Refining Margin dropped from $9.9/bbl to $7.5/bbl [bbl: oil barrel] in the last quarter of FY’10, when the same for other Asian refiners it grew very handsomely – and it become quite clear that even the largest wealth creator has no respect for straightforward seat-of-the-pants profit versus m-cap correlations. And RIL’s stock is still marching ahead at the bourses garnering brilliantly high m-cap figures.


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Monday, August 13, 2012

Lessons from the past

The rotational chief minister system was experimented with by the BJP and the BSP in 1998 in Uttar Pradesh where a deal was stuck under which Mayawati was to be chief minister for the first six months of the coalition government following which the BJP’s chief minster nominate would have taken over. BJP got the posts of deputy chief minister and leader and deputy chairman of the Legislative Council. However, merely 28 days after her six months got over and Kalyan Singh became the CM, Mayawati did a volte face and withdrew support.

When the Congress and PDP formed a coalition government in Jammu and Kashmir after the 2002 elections, they had decided to share the post of the chief minister for three years each. They had shared power accordingly starting with PDP chief minister Mufti Muhammad Sayeed at the helm. The transfer of power was smooth and Ghulam Nabi Azad took over after three years. However, the PDP never came to terms with the reality and a section of it never actually wanted Azad. In short, they were looking for an opportunity to withdraw support. 


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