Anil Manibhai Naik, chairman and managing director of Larsen & Toubro, sees himself as a dynamic workaholic. Ever since he took over as CEO and managing director in 1999 and thereafter assumed the chairmanship in 2003, he’s seen his role as “more than half a public servant”.
The latter assumption stems from the fact that his company is involved in almost every large project of note — from the modernisation of the Delhi airport, the Delhi metro, and a host of highway projects, to name just a few.
As one of the front-runners to buy Satyam, L&T’s close association with many key infrastructure projects India so critically needs will no doubt be a part of the hard sell that Naik will make to the troubled software company’s government-nominated board.
Satyam may appear an odd choice for a company that’s strongly focused on engineering and construction. The company has unofficially said the interest is strategic because of its 4 per cent stake in the company — some of it acquired after Raju’s confessions.
A closer look suggests that the bid isn’t so out of synch with Naik’s vision for the company. He’s long seen IT and human resources as core to the company’s growth. Besides, there are synergies with L&T Infotech, the engineering conglomerate’s wholly-owned subsidiary.
L&T Infotech, in fact, is a fairly large outfit. It was set up in 1997 and now has 10,000 employees and a turnover of $425 million (Rs 2,000-odd crore) with clients such as Hitachi, Lafarge and Chevron. Like Satyam, it has expertise in enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions which could prove a useful springboard for growth.
Still, given that no one has a fix on the depth of the accounting fraud to which Satyam’s promoter Ramalinga Raju confessed January 7, L&T’s interest can certainly be called bold. Even assuming a buyer will not acquire Satyam’s liabilities (once a forensic audit figures out what they are), regaining global client confidence will be just one of many challenges they’ll be up against.
But then, no one would accuse Naik of lack of confidence in his own abilities. Indeed, as he admitted in an interview to Business Standard last year, it was one of the reasons that nearly did not get him his first job in L&T in 1964 as assistant engineer. The Danish general manager who interviewed him found him “over-smart” but luckily for Naik, his immediate Scots boss decided to take a chance on him.
Educated in a village school in his native Kharel, Gujarat and later in Vallabh Vidyanagar, near Anand, Naik did not possess many of the attributes considered indispensable to a job in corporate India in those days. He was academically brilliant, he says, but his English was poor. So poor that he didn’t get past an exam to join steel company Mukand. It says something that he gamely learnt from that setback to acquire language videos and practice delivery in front of a mirror.
Naik’s command of the English language may be still be idiosyncratic, but that never impaired his rise up the ranks at L&T or the rapidity with which the corporation has grown under him. He took charge as managing director of a company with a turnover of just under Rs 7,000 crore and grew it to almost Rs 25,000 crore by 2007-08, making it a model of the virtues of professional management. In many ways, it’s now pretty much on auto pilot. Reviving Satyam, therefore, may well be the new challenge he’ll relish.
