Sarthak Behuria is a quintessential oil man with a penchant for big numbers and big challenges, both of which he has got aplenty in his 18-month tenure at the helm of the $41 billion Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), the country's largest oil refiner and marketer. He wants to lead IOC to $60 billion in revenues by 2011-12, and has set his sights on multiplying that number five-fold by 2030, to $300 billion. To do that, the company will have to undertake forward integration into petrochemicals, and also expand crude oil refining capacities, as part of a just-announced Rs 50,000 crore investment plan, which includes a vast network of pipelines and LNG terminals too.
Refining capacity will be "almost doubled" to 80 million tonnes, against 41 million tonnes currently.
These projects would require rare execution skills, and that is what the 54-old has been busy putting together within this vast public sector organisation.
Behuria's aim, like that of any true-blue businessman, is to multiply the money invested """I don't want to fritter away Rs 5,000 crore on retail outlets," he says, "I want to move away from (being) a marketing person to a CEO for a company which makes money. If we don't make money, we can do nothing."
And making money has been tough, thanks to the steep hike in global crude oil prices which hit the Fortune 500 company (153 on the list) pretty hard, since it was forced to buffer the Indian consumer from the impact of that escalation "" which meant absorbing retail losses.
The result was that while Behuria's vision of the future scaled new highs at one end, he had to spend a large chunk of his time "firefighting" the flare-up in oil prices, on the other.
After hectic parlays, something which comes naturally to Behuria who boasts of "bureaucratic antecedents", he managed to push the government to provide some relief in the form of oil bonds. "To get these bonds has not been a joke," says the alumnus from IIM Ahmedabad, "my biggest success is that we managed a profit."
Those close to him say that he would have had some gleaming feathers in his cap "" he did attempt some strategic firsts like pitching for the Tupras refinery in Turkey ""but has had to struggle with working capital and other such "mundane" issues.
Nevertheless, his dexterous handling of the contradictions of the corporate and sarkari world (the government owns 82 per cent of the company), and of the opposing pulls of the long term vision of the company "" to emerge as a large integrated player "" and the immediate challenges, would silence many a critic.
As for his friends, there is his long time bridge partner Murli Deora, who is also his boss now as the petroleum minister. Shouldn't this raise a few eyebrows? Not to his mind. "It makes life easy," he quips, as he ambles away to meet his boss. And no, he has never thought that he could be better off in the private sector!
