Newsmaker: Pramod Bhasin

A trendspotter's encore

Pramod Bhasin

PRAMOD BHASIN,
President and CEO,
GE Capital International Services

In the late nineties, he was one of the major players credited with spotting the opportunity that put India on the map as the world's hottest business process outsourcing (BPO) destination.

Last week, Pramod Bhasin, president and CEO of GE Capital International Services (Gecis), was in the news again when the company he heads was partly sold to two US investors for $500 million in one of the biggest deals in India's booming IT-enabled services sector.

Bhasin will continue to head the company in which GE will be the largest shareholder with a 40 per cent stake. The remaining 60 per cent is being equally shared between General Atlantic Partners and Oak Hill Capital Partners.

In a way, his continuing stewardship "" no doubt to ensure continuity in a company for which GE will be the biggest customer for some years "" is fitting.

ITES has been Bhasin's passion. Gecis, GE India chief executive Scott Bayman acknowledged, was very much Bhasin's Big Idea.

It emerged at a time when GE businesses were up against an economic slowdown in India and the US economy was running at full employment, so running back-office operations there was a high-cost affair.

The opportunity converged with India's growing telecoms revolution that made remote servicing a hitherto unexplored possibility. Even as discussions for divestment in Gecis began more than a year ago, Bhasin remained convinced that ITES would continue as a major growth and employment driver for India in many ways both directly and because of its spin-off benefits.

"Governments are realising that this is a great way to create jobs," he told Business Standard some months ago, "not just in the call centres but in transportation, meals and so on. Also, there are so many young people with money to spend, more money than I had when I was young."

Surprisingly, though, his prediction was that the big competition to India in ITES would come from South Africa rather than China, as many analysts predict.

As he pointed out South Africa had India's advantages of low cost and a population that speaks, apart from English, French, German and Dutch as well.

At 50-plus, Bhasin's infectious enthusiasm for this very New Age industry is almost at variance with his rather staid background in hardcore accountancy.

A graduate of Delhi's Sri Ram College of Commerce, Bhasin is a GE hand of some two decades. He joined the company when the US corporation acquired RCA in which he headed the international audit practice.

More than two decades at GE has been salutary training for corporate stewardship. Bhasin equated it to being in the marine corps, a hard, sometimes merciless, training ground not just for good accountants but for future managers.

Naturally, that Welchian world has left little time for much else.

He does, however, find time for the occasional round of golf (but confesses to being an indifferent player), cricket, even reading (he's a Rohinton Mistry fan) and spending time with his teenage daughter. Now, steering Gecis towards newer markets and deriving greater value in an increasingly challenging environment might leave less time for even these pursuits.