 "<b>Lunch with BS:</b> Gurmit Singh")
Over a simple meal, Gurmit Singh tells Alokananda Chakraborty how working with Yahoo! has given him the chance to interact with different cultures and learn about other markets
Singh arrives half an hour early for lunch but still says sorry. "I didn't want to rush you," he tells me extending a polite handshake. Diminutive, soft-spoken and dressed semi-formally, the forty-something managing director of Yahoo! India is courteous to a fault.
It's just after noon and we are seated at The Oberoi's (New Delhi) Threesixty Degrees restaurant. I can see people walking up and down purposefully in the lobby outside, but inside, the restaurant is kind of empty. Maybe it's too early for lunch.
Singh looks at the menu reluctantly - he is not much of a foodie, I gather. He ignores the starters. A shared concern for our ability to go back to work after a sumptuous meal established, we settle for Thai green curry and rice. Singh says he turned vegetarian a month or so back - "for some time, just to challenge myself, to see if I can do it". I go for the non-vegetarian version of the same preparation.
As we meet, I reflect that Singh is different from most alpha technology bosses I have met, in at least two ways. He is not at all geeky - I was half expecting to meet someone who would dazzle me with his technical smarts. Then, is Yahoo! a technology company or a media company? Some analysts have said Yahoo! itself is yet to resolve that question, so I can stop agonising. Second, he is completely unselfconscious.
Singh rarely does interviews, so I start off tentatively. Everyone is talking about Yahoo! these days and the good thing is there is a lot of positive buzz around it now than, say, three years ago, I say. "Of course. We have been a profitable company and we are much more charged up now after the leadership change in 2012," he says. He also points out that Yahoo! shares have gone up in value (nearly tripled) during CEO Marissa Mayer's tenure. Well, the estimated value of the company's stake in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is worth nearly as much as the company's entire market cap, I point out. "But we are on the right track: employee morale is high, the acquisitions are in line with where the markets are going, so eventually we will get the momentum that we have been looking for."
He insists the days of uncertainty preceding Mayer's appointment - she was Yahoo's sixth CEO in five years, including two interim CEOs - are firmly behind the company. We discuss the proposed spin-off of Yahoo!'s 15.4 per cent remaining stake in Alibaba Group, valued at about $40 billion, into a newly formed independent registered investment company. The stock of the new company will be distributed pro rata to Yahoo! shareholders, resulting in the spin-off becoming a separate, publicly traded company, and avoiding a 40 per cent tax hit on the sale (roughly $16 billion).
At this point, we are interrupted by the arrival of the food.
I pick up the conversation. Yahoo!'s problems are not unique and actually reflect a shift in consumer habits - more and more people are using mobile devices to get onto the internet. And my understanding is that small mobile ads are less lucrative than the bigger ones that you see on computer screens. So, we see players like Google focusing on developing better mobile advertising products. Microsoft has the same issues but it is a diverse company. What are Yahoo!'s plans?
Mayer hasn't travelled to India, I try to lighten the mood. Not yet, but she will, because India is a big market and even (Alibaba founder) Jack Ma was here, Singh laughs.
Prior to joining Yahoo!, Singh was the CEO of Forbes India at Network 18. I try to get him to talk about Reliance Industries' takeover of Network 18 last year, the biggest in India's media industry, and the changes before that, but with little success. "You are talking about the Network 18 takeover or the earlier problems in the magazine," he asks, and I get the feeling he wasn't expecting me to tread that territory. "The takeover, of course, and the exodus from the editorial the year before..." I press on. "I was there when the exodus from the edit team happened, but by the time Reliance took over I had moved to Yahoo!. About the exodus, what I gathered was there were some differences of opinion." His reluctance to talk about those days is understandable. The episode was far from happy.
One interesting thing about his career is that Singh - a business administration graduate from the Faculty of Management Studies at the University of Delhi, and a gold medallist in mechanical engineering from Osmania University, Hyderabad - has worked with a number of media and related companies such as Sony Music Entertainment India, HT Media, the India Today Group and Rajshri Media, besides working for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) company Marico Ltd. So does he consider himself some sort of a media specialist? And which one of these stints does he cherish the most?
He is too polite to call himself a specialist and predictably, he says he enjoyed all his stints. He talks of his time at Marico (he joined in 1993), his first job, with great fondness. "It was like joining a start-up - it is an extremely, extremely aggressive company. It is where it is today because of that. It competes with the Levers and the P&Gs of the world and so brilliantly!" One really learnt the ropes of 'managing' in that company, he says. The job rotation he underwent in his first year - involving four modules of three months each - was a real eye-opener for him. "It really set the foundation. If you check around, people will tell you Marico is the best training ground."
"It is also the reason you don't see a major people churn at Marico - it is a very satisfying employer to work for. Even today, I am in touch with them - (chairman) Harsh Mariwala, the entire alumni and the people who worked there at the time. It's a beautiful blend of aggression and a great professional environment," he sums up.
His next job was at Sony, which was trying to change the face of the music industry at that time. By then, he had moved back to Delhi and, to an extent, helped set up the company's operations in India. "The job description was as entrepreneurial as it gets." The music business was wholesale-led and the company was set on transforming the structure of distribution. "Sony hired all its sales people from FMCG companies," he points out, and that "the whole business of music at that time was completely different from what it is like now". Next stop: the India Today Group, where he was in charge of its music operations (Music Today). It was a very "enabling environment", he says, and that meant he was virtually creating a new product every day.
We are almost at the end of lunch and Singh begins to narrate how he hopped three jobs in quick succession - moving to Rajshri Media, then to HT Media, and finally, to Network 18. "Network 18 was fantastic - it had a marketing piece, a distribution piece, a circulation piece; it had a magazine, it had a digital play. Above all, it had an international play. It was complete."
As we get ready to part, we resort to the standard topic of management banter: how different is Yahoo! from all the home-grown companies he has worked for?
"Yahoo! has a global play, so it gives you the opportunity to interact with different cultures; it gives an opportunity to know about other markets from their perspective. It also is extremely process-driven - and that's one thing everybody should learn from them."
Singh arrives half an hour early for lunch but still says sorry. "I didn't want to rush you," he tells me extending a polite handshake. Diminutive, soft-spoken and dressed semi-formally, the forty-something managing director of Yahoo! India is courteous to a fault.
It's just after noon and we are seated at The Oberoi's (New Delhi) Threesixty Degrees restaurant. I can see people walking up and down purposefully in the lobby outside, but inside, the restaurant is kind of empty. Maybe it's too early for lunch.
Singh looks at the menu reluctantly - he is not much of a foodie, I gather. He ignores the starters. A shared concern for our ability to go back to work after a sumptuous meal established, we settle for Thai green curry and rice. Singh says he turned vegetarian a month or so back - "for some time, just to challenge myself, to see if I can do it". I go for the non-vegetarian version of the same preparation.
As we meet, I reflect that Singh is different from most alpha technology bosses I have met, in at least two ways. He is not at all geeky - I was half expecting to meet someone who would dazzle me with his technical smarts. Then, is Yahoo! a technology company or a media company? Some analysts have said Yahoo! itself is yet to resolve that question, so I can stop agonising. Second, he is completely unselfconscious.
Singh rarely does interviews, so I start off tentatively. Everyone is talking about Yahoo! these days and the good thing is there is a lot of positive buzz around it now than, say, three years ago, I say. "Of course. We have been a profitable company and we are much more charged up now after the leadership change in 2012," he says. He also points out that Yahoo! shares have gone up in value (nearly tripled) during CEO Marissa Mayer's tenure. Well, the estimated value of the company's stake in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is worth nearly as much as the company's entire market cap, I point out. "But we are on the right track: employee morale is high, the acquisitions are in line with where the markets are going, so eventually we will get the momentum that we have been looking for."
He insists the days of uncertainty preceding Mayer's appointment - she was Yahoo's sixth CEO in five years, including two interim CEOs - are firmly behind the company. We discuss the proposed spin-off of Yahoo!'s 15.4 per cent remaining stake in Alibaba Group, valued at about $40 billion, into a newly formed independent registered investment company. The stock of the new company will be distributed pro rata to Yahoo! shareholders, resulting in the spin-off becoming a separate, publicly traded company, and avoiding a 40 per cent tax hit on the sale (roughly $16 billion).
At this point, we are interrupted by the arrival of the food.
I pick up the conversation. Yahoo!'s problems are not unique and actually reflect a shift in consumer habits - more and more people are using mobile devices to get onto the internet. And my understanding is that small mobile ads are less lucrative than the bigger ones that you see on computer screens. So, we see players like Google focusing on developing better mobile advertising products. Microsoft has the same issues but it is a diverse company. What are Yahoo!'s plans?
Gurmit Singh
I would have started on my lunch but I see Singh hasn't even looked at the food. The subject is sensitive, I can see. Yahoo!'s mobile revenues have grown and the pace of innovation at the company has sped up, he says, and flips his tablet cover to give me a low-down of the changes - the new design and all the new features that Yahoo! has incorporated in its website, or is working on, to make it more user-friendly and stay relevant in today's rapidly changing business landscape.Mayer hasn't travelled to India, I try to lighten the mood. Not yet, but she will, because India is a big market and even (Alibaba founder) Jack Ma was here, Singh laughs.
Prior to joining Yahoo!, Singh was the CEO of Forbes India at Network 18. I try to get him to talk about Reliance Industries' takeover of Network 18 last year, the biggest in India's media industry, and the changes before that, but with little success. "You are talking about the Network 18 takeover or the earlier problems in the magazine," he asks, and I get the feeling he wasn't expecting me to tread that territory. "The takeover, of course, and the exodus from the editorial the year before..." I press on. "I was there when the exodus from the edit team happened, but by the time Reliance took over I had moved to Yahoo!. About the exodus, what I gathered was there were some differences of opinion." His reluctance to talk about those days is understandable. The episode was far from happy.
One interesting thing about his career is that Singh - a business administration graduate from the Faculty of Management Studies at the University of Delhi, and a gold medallist in mechanical engineering from Osmania University, Hyderabad - has worked with a number of media and related companies such as Sony Music Entertainment India, HT Media, the India Today Group and Rajshri Media, besides working for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) company Marico Ltd. So does he consider himself some sort of a media specialist? And which one of these stints does he cherish the most?
He is too polite to call himself a specialist and predictably, he says he enjoyed all his stints. He talks of his time at Marico (he joined in 1993), his first job, with great fondness. "It was like joining a start-up - it is an extremely, extremely aggressive company. It is where it is today because of that. It competes with the Levers and the P&Gs of the world and so brilliantly!" One really learnt the ropes of 'managing' in that company, he says. The job rotation he underwent in his first year - involving four modules of three months each - was a real eye-opener for him. "It really set the foundation. If you check around, people will tell you Marico is the best training ground."
"It is also the reason you don't see a major people churn at Marico - it is a very satisfying employer to work for. Even today, I am in touch with them - (chairman) Harsh Mariwala, the entire alumni and the people who worked there at the time. It's a beautiful blend of aggression and a great professional environment," he sums up.
His next job was at Sony, which was trying to change the face of the music industry at that time. By then, he had moved back to Delhi and, to an extent, helped set up the company's operations in India. "The job description was as entrepreneurial as it gets." The music business was wholesale-led and the company was set on transforming the structure of distribution. "Sony hired all its sales people from FMCG companies," he points out, and that "the whole business of music at that time was completely different from what it is like now". Next stop: the India Today Group, where he was in charge of its music operations (Music Today). It was a very "enabling environment", he says, and that meant he was virtually creating a new product every day.
We are almost at the end of lunch and Singh begins to narrate how he hopped three jobs in quick succession - moving to Rajshri Media, then to HT Media, and finally, to Network 18. "Network 18 was fantastic - it had a marketing piece, a distribution piece, a circulation piece; it had a magazine, it had a digital play. Above all, it had an international play. It was complete."
As we get ready to part, we resort to the standard topic of management banter: how different is Yahoo! from all the home-grown companies he has worked for?
"Yahoo! has a global play, so it gives you the opportunity to interact with different cultures; it gives an opportunity to know about other markets from their perspective. It also is extremely process-driven - and that's one thing everybody should learn from them."