GR GOPINATH
Redefining middle class transport
Two years ago, anyone talking of flying from Delhi to Mumbai for Rs 4,000 would have been charged with day dreaming. Today, thousands would say with pride that they have done it for much less, under Rs 750, even Rs 223. While 54-year-old GR Gopinath, a one-time captain in the army, cannot claim the entire credit for this, he certainly started it all with his Air Deccan which has got 24 aircraft in 24 months of launch. In 2005, four new airlines took off replicating Gopinath's model and six more intend to do so in 2006.
The community of new airline passengers owes it to a dam project which deluged the land owned by Gopinath's family. At that time the captain, having left the army in 1979, was into farming. On the 40 acres that he received from the government as compensation, he, after a few failed crops, started rearing silkworms. The project was a success.
Subsequently, Gopinath moved to Bangalore and started a helicopter service in 1997 with friend and helicopter pilot K J Samuel. Soon after, a trip to Europe exposed Gopinath to low cost carrier Ryanair. Inspired, he prepared a similar business plan.
Next year, when competition will consist of 10 other low-cost carriers, will be a test of Gopinath's staying power. Air Deccan has ordered 30 Airbus A320 planes, whose total list price comes to $1.5 billion. The company is expected to float an IPO or go in for private placement of shares next year. Then there are birds of prey circling overhead. Virgin's Richard Branson has offered to buy Air Deccan. So has UB Group chairman Vijay Mallya.
KV KAMATH
'Surprisingly, not SBI' could be his tag
Remember all the ads about which bank has the largest ATM network and so on, and the tag line 'Surprisingly SBI'? Well, the person who's beaten SBI where it matters most, and will better his lead in the new year, is Kundapur Vaman Kamath. This year, despite being smaller than SBI on several parameters, ICICI Bank's market capitalisation is Rs 50,480 crore, compared to SBI's Rs 46,912 crore. Kamath also scored by raising over Rs 8,000 crore through issue of fresh shares, the highest ever by a private sector firm.
The speed with which he has transformed ICICI from a term-lending institution catering exclusively to corporate clients, to a retail bank with over 15 million customers, has been nothing short of spectacular. The CEO, who has had a passion for cars since his childhood, spotted the retail opportunity first and was also among the earliest to put the strengths of technology to use. The aggression with which the bank pursued its strategy""it has the largest ATM network in the country, after SBI "" has paid off as can be seen in the tremendous franchise that the bank boasts today. With a retail portfolio of close to Rs 70,000 crore, it is the market leader in almost every segment that it has a presence in, be it home loans or credit cards.
The CEO has already identified the next big growth areas "" the rural space and the global market. If past performance is any indication of the future, ICICI Bank will continue to go places.
MUKESH AND ANIL AMBANI
Divided, now rule
Fights between brothers are not uncommon. But if the fighting brothers control an empire worth Rs 100,000 crore and use the national media as the vehicles for their salvos, it is difficult to keep them out of a year-end list of newsmakers. For good measure, Mukesh and Anil Ambani also agreed to a split this year. In the process, they kept 3.5 million shareholders on tenterhooks, extracted a request from the finance minister to patch up, gave juicy quotes like "it's Reliance Eleven versus Anil Ambani" and "Beta, let's discuss", and got embroiled in controversy over telecom practices.
The year is ending with reports that Mukesh Ambani, having parted with Infocomm (Reliance Energy and Capital too went to Anil), is ordering MTNL lines at his office.
Next year, just like the last so many, it will be difficult to keep either off the front pages. Anil Ambani has been the first off the blocks. He quickly acquired control over insurance company AMP Sanmar and film production and exhibition company Adlabs Films. He scaled up his dream power project near Dadri in Uttar Pradesh from 3,740 mw to 5,500 mw. At present, his firm is seen as one of the front-runners for executing the modernisation of Delhi and Mumbai airports.
Elder brother Mukesh, in control of Reliance Industries and IPCL has most of the cash flow and announced big ticket expansion plans late in the year, even as he identified agriculture, infrastructure projects, retail and life sciences as thrust areas. Expect his big moves in the new year, especially the roll-out of a Walmart-style retail operation that could dwarf the Infocomm venture (now with Anil) in ambitious audacity.
SAMIR JAIN
Profit from the news
Like him or hate him, you've got to say in Bennett Coleman & Company's vice chairman Samir Jain favour, no one in the media business is anywhere nearly as innovative. Nor can anyone rival the juggernaut he's helped fashion since the late '80s. In terms of circulation, turnover, or profit. At Rs 2,363 crore for 2004-05, his sales were 70 per cent more than Zee Telefilms' Rs 1,308 crore "" the difference for net profits was about the same, with Jain's figure at Rs 529 crore and Zee at Rs 312 crore. And the media war in Mumbai, with the launch of Zee's and Dainik Bhaskar's DNA and Hindustan Times, hasn't hurt Jain's The Times of India in the manner many either hoped or predicted.
In terms of innovation, what has gathered steam in recent months is what the Times people call "private treaties": Jain locks in large advertisers with bulk deals that have a twist. The Times has sewn up over 40 deals with companies, such as Pantaloon, where it buys up part of the company's equity in return for a commitment that the money will be used for advertising in group publications. In effect, the Times guarantees itself ad revenue (and in the process denies the revenue to rivals), and gets paid in shares. If positive editorial coverage is part of the "treaty" and the company's share price goes up as a result, then the Times benefits even more.
What of journalistic ethics and treating the reader to independent judgement of corporate news? For a group that pioneered getting paid for news reports (its Medianet operation) and even pictures, the lakshman rekha's not strongly marked out and sometimes not visible at all. Jain, who has cared little for journalistic censure, has managed to achieve market dominance in the English language newspaper market, with The Times of India and The Economic Times clear leaders in circulation. And he has a bottom line and bank balance that make other publishers go green with envy. Old-timers may blanch at his use of value-free terms like "optimum media solutions" to describe the innovations that he introduces into publishing, but if the marketplace is where success is being measured, Jain's innovations have certainly paid off.
JAPANESE INVESTORS
Tsunami of Big Bull-sans here to stay
Traditionally, when the Japanese enter, it's time to get out. Whether it's automobiles as Detroit discovered, or audio systems or gaming, the Japs have, tsunami-like, wiped out everyone in their path. But stock markets?
Okay, the story's a bit different here. The Japanese have a history of entering a market long after everyone else, so their entry is a good time to exit. This time round, however, the story looks different. Japanese funds have contributed about half the net foreign institutional investor (FII) flows of $10.6 billion this year, and a year down the line, the market is up by around 37 per cent. So, if you went by conventional logic and exited when Big Bull-san entered, you're the poorer for it.
So great is the Japanese appetite for India that Nomura Asset Management Corporation had to close its new India fund one day after it was launched in June because of overwhelming demand. The fund had expected to raise some ¥50 billion (around $440 million), but gathered ¥100 billion in the first day itself. Similarly, Merrill Lynch shut its sales window on day one after its fund collected $750 million in an initial subscription. Several other funds are slated to launch their India funds in the rush to capture the huge demand for Indian equities.
While Japanese investors earlier shopped for blue chips like Infosys, Reliance, Tata Motors and Maruti, they have been equally gung ho about smaller business ranging from sugar to steel and textiles to auto ancillaries. Some of the stocks in which they have sizeable exposures include drug makers like Alembic, Glenmark, Ind Swift Labs, Matrix Labs and even the battered, research-oriented biggie Dr Reddy's. In the technology space they have been big buyers in Satyam Computers, Patni Computers and HCL Infosystems. From us in the markets: Arigato Gozaimasta!
AMITABH BACHCHAN
Back in the Black, and how
We'd predicted that this year we'd be singing a requiem for the Big B. He'd had a disastrous 2004 (remember Boom and Kyun...! Ho Gaya Na?) with a treacly and unbelievable Baghban as his biggest hit. India was a young country, it needed youthful icons. How was Amitabh Bachchan in his streaked wig and white French beard going to fit that role?
He bounced back with Black and a sterling (if melodramatic) role that should have taken him at least to the Oscar red carpet. He made you laugh in Bunty Aur Babli. He agonised in Viruddh, was menacing in Sarkar, and could have been a model in the trendy Ek Ajnabee.
Some other films sank without a trace, but you hardly noticed that because Bachchan Sr was everywhere "" propping up Jr, popping out of your TV screen in a record number of ads (including some truly terrible ones), and then came back to host Kaun Banega Crorepati for the dwitiya round. He humbled audiences, sold everything from dreams to detergent, and just when you'd really had enough of him, he was hospitalised and India went into collective mourning reminiscent of his surgery at the peak of his stardom. And for days, news channels turned into Bachchan blockbusters. Even as he was recovering amidst a flurry of VIP visits to the hospital, Rs 300 crore rode on his pulse, the bulk of it in films in various stages of completion, part of it in even more endorsements, and a chunk in the since-delayed episodes of KBC2. For an asthmatic vegan, Bachchan is proving indestructible. It's clear there's simply no alternative to the colossus who's reigned over Bollywood for over three decades now.
VIKRAM SETH
Breathing life into a shameful past
Towards the end of Two Lives, Vikram Seth finally allows his own voice free reign: throughout his painstaking reconstruction of the lives of the uncle and aunt who were practically second parents for him, his voice has been muffled so that theirs might be heard. "These two people whom I loved and who loved me may not, in differing degrees, have wanted every stroke "" sometimes distorted, sometimes overexplicit "" of this portrait. But they are dead and past caring; and I want them complexly remembered."
Writing Two Lives forced Seth to confront and hold up to the light the true nature of the Holocaust, the Indian role in the Great Wars, and the darker corners of family history. Shanti Behari Seth lost his right arm in the battle of Monte Cassino; after the war, he set up practice as a dentist in London with his Jewish wife, Henny Gerda Caro, who lost her mother and sister to Hitler's death camps. Through their lives, tumultuous but ordinary, apolitical but enmeshed in the inexorable politics of the age, Seth rediscovers the meaning of the Hebrew word inscribed in a memorial garden in Hendon Park. "A sign mentions the Jewish holocaust in the context of more recent events in Cambodia, in Bosnia, in Rwanda, and goes on to explain the single word above the arch: 'Lezikaron. The meaning refers to the importance of looking forward as well as remembering the past.'" Seth's Two Lives has been on the best-selling list in India for several months, and with older books like A Suitable Boy and The Golden Gate still doing well, he's clearly both a literary and commercial success.
PRAFUL PATEL, DAYANIDHI MARAN, MANI SHANKAR AIYAR, P CHIDAMBARAM AND KAMAL NATH
Spotting the Five Pandavas
Yudhishthir: Clearly Finance Minister P Chidambaram. Yudhishthir was respected by everyone because he never told lies, always went by the book, lost his empire gambling but got it back later. So no more experiments in regional politics for Chidambaram. And unlike blind Dhritarashtra, Manmohan Singh is not likely to give up one of his most efficient ministers.
Arjun: Was known for his singlemindedness and his qualities as a warrior, he spoke a great deal about the crises in his life "" in fact so much that Krishna had to give him a lesson in the middle of the battlefield when he was in danger of forgetting his dharma. Does that remind you of Petroleum Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar's outspokenness on the performance of PSUs? And who will be Krishna here?
Bhim: Brawn, not brain, was his strong point. Is that why Kamal Nath keeps throwing at us "" and anyone who'll listen "" that he's always succeeded at everything he's done because he's been winning in the Lok Sabha for 26 years? Bhim was known for his prodigious appetite. All Nath eats is chewing gum!
Nakul: Was adept at managing cattle "" in fact that's where he lived (the cattleshed) when the Pandavas were in exile and in disguise. Nakul was known for his patience and was the most handsome of the Pandavas. Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel's job is to transform Air-India and Indian Airlines without the benefit of a disguise. And he will need a LOT of patience.
Sahdev: Had the gift of seeing into the future. Possibly, Dayanidhi Maran can see the disaster that the Tamil Nadu Assembly elections are going to spell for the DMK "" so he's taking insurance. Every IT and telecom project is going to Chennai.
ARJUN MUNDA, NAVIN PATNAIK AND BUDDHADEB BHATTACHARYA
The Three Musketeers
The Three Musketeers is actually about four people. The hero, d'Artagnan, comes to Paris to become a soldier, but chances upon Athos, Porthos and Aramis. They fight with him but later become friends. The politics of The Three Musketeers is the politics of post-French Revolution Paris, imbued with intrigue, conspiracy and the challenge of change.
In this respect, West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, Orissa Chief Minister Navin Patnaik and Jharkhand Chief Minister Arjun Munda share a common destiny. All three represent forces of politics that are uncertain about reacting to change. They know it is important to bring about change and are convinced it will create a new constituency for them.
Bhattacharya wants socialism but a society where everyone can enjoy a better quality of life. So he is not opposed to foreign investment in certain categories of enterprise, is restructuring sick industrial units to revive them, but wouldn't baulk at closing down those that are still unviable. "We know it's either reform or perish", he said once.
Navin Patnaik, with virtually no party organisation, has managed to render the Opposition irrelevant because of the money he's brought to Orissa, investment to the tune of Rs 150,000-Rs 200,00 crore is expected to flow into the state to build steel and aluminium producing capacity, power projects, ports and other infrastructure projects over the next five years. During the finalisation of the 2005-06 Plan negotiations, the Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission complimented Orissa for economic reforms and working towards creating an investor friendly environment and in what must have been music to Patnaik's ears, said the flow of Central assistance to the states in various social sector programmes was likely to increase.
Arjun Munda is the only BJP leader to have joined the party 10 years ago and risen to become a chief minister. His socialisation is not high culture but tribal. Munda is getting Rs 200,000 crore of private investment to Jharkhand, half within two years, but, given the strength of the Maoist movement, could end up dividing tribal society into two bitter sections, always at war with each other. Change is taking place too rapidly in Jharkhand. This could spell danger.
