Life's sweet

MY BIG IDEA

Shivendra Srivastava

Shivendra Srivastava started his career conventionally enough; with a degree in electronics and a postgraduate degree in international marketing, he looked all set to make his mark on the corporate world.

What was unexpected, however, was his foray into biotechnology, which would see him playing a large role in bringing to India the plant stevia in his recently launched product, Stevi0cal, a natural sweetener that may be the step forward for India's growing number of diabetics.

Natural leader

After my postgraduate degree in international marketing, I was immediately snapped up by the Hamdard group. I had to singlehandedly set up from scratch their international marketing division.

I was lucky in that I had a good product base to market, but still it was a bit of a struggle to go from nothing, as I did, to a Rs 25 crore department with seven people working under me in only four years.

Hamdard actually gave me an introduction to herbal products. I travelled to countries like UAE, Iran, Iraq and Kuwait, where the market is quite large for natural medicines.

The heat is on

After my four years in Hamdard, I felt as though I should move on. I moved to a multinational company, where I was their director country operations in India.

Chase Perdana Berhad, a Malaysia-based company, manufactured pharmaceuticals, polymers and so on. One product that I was very interested in was their heat shrinkable tubing, very useful in automobiles, railways, electronics and so on, which I developed a market for here in India.

In 2000, I set up my own company with my partner, Regil Techno India, with which I promoted use of heat shrink technology and brought it closer to the Indian market.

It has proven a very profitable venture: this year Rigil Techno made Rs 5 crore, and we're working with names like Maruti, Hyundai and Honda.

The business of business

Setting up a business, thanks to my experience with Hamdard, wasn't very difficult. I felt confident that I had a strong product, and that I could make the venture work.

Also, my partner was an accountant, and this helped tremendously because I could leave much of the technicalities of the finances up to him.

We were also lucky because we could keep our operational costs low; there's not much scope to get institutional financing for first-time entrepreneurs in this country. Till today, we haven't used any institutional financing.

Back to basics

At this time, I was travelling back and forth between India and China a lot, and in 2003, during one of my trips I stumbled across the stevia plant, Stevia Rebaudianais, a natural sweetener. China caters to the Japanese market (which is very large "" they even use it in their diet cola) for stevia, and so they grow quite a lot of it.

I realised then, that with India's health problems (the WHO predicts that we'll have 70 million diabetics in India by 2020), that it would be a great product for the Indian market.

Building awareness

In November 2003, we market tested stevia at the International Trade Fair. At that point, no one, even doctors, knew that such a product was available. The general feeling was, if it's so good, why haven't we heard of it?

And that's the situation we tried to rectify. Based on feedback from this market test, I set up Regil Biotech in April 2004 and in December 2004, was finally able to launch Stevi0cal in India.

The way forward

The response to Stevi0cal has been fair so far, but we're expecting the demand for it to grow significantly. We realise that it has to be promoted through the medical fraternity.

The artificial sweetener market is a Rs 60 crore one; given this, there has to be room for a natural sweetener, with no side effects, as well.

In the long-term, we'd like to grow stevia here, and we have started a pilot project especially for this purpose, but first we recognise we'll need to build up demand.

This is such an essential product that I'd even welcome competition "" at least it would drive the industry further! I'm confident that, as with my other ventures, I can make this a success as well. It's just a question of time.