A six-member jury selects L&T as Company of the Year.
Crompton Greaves Managing Director & CEO Sudhir Trehan is the Business Standard CEO of the Year for 2008-09. Trehan was selected by a distinguished six-member jury led by Godrej Group Chairman Adi Godrej.
The 63-year-old Trehan, who joined the engineering major as management trainee 38 years ago, has made Crompton the seventh largest power transformer company in the world with the help of a fast-paced international expansion that saw the Avantha Group firm making five acquisitions in the last four years.
The jury members said Trehan had risen to the challenge of competing in an industry that was fiercely competitive and had come through with flying colours. When he took over as managing director in May 2000, the Mumbai-headquartered Crompton was a loss-making company with huge debts and its operations were primarily concentrated in the domestic market. Today, it’s a Rs 9,000 crore company, growing at a compounded annual growth rate of over 25 per cent. Its net profit has been growing at over 35 per cent annually over the last five years. But more than numbers, what tilted the scale in his favour is Crompton’s reputation as a company that fought hard even as it maintained the highest corporate governance standards.
Read about the achievements of the BS CEO of the Year and other winners in the BS 1000 magazine that is being distributed with Business Standard today.
The jury decided to introduce a new category this year — Company of the Year — and the choice was engineering heavyweight Larsen & Toubro (L&T).
The numbers are impressive (the over Rs 40,000 crore company has been clocking a sales growth of over 35 per cent), and the jury felt that L&T is best positioned for the future in complex and critical businesses that are vital for India’s growth.
The unanimous verdict was that L&T has played a dominant role in areas ranging from high-rise constructions to India's moon mission to nuclear submarines, and richly deserves the honour.
Three other companies were selected for Business Standard’s “Star” awards in different categories. The jury chose power equipment giant Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (BHEL) as the Star Public Sector Company for its game-changing role in the industry; fast-moving consumer goods major Nestle India as the Star Multinational for its innovation drive; and OnMobile, which is India’s largest and only listed player in the telecom value-added services space, as the Star Company in the Small and Medium Enterprises sector
Other than Godrej, the members of the jury were TCS Vice-Chairman S Ramadorai, KKR India CEO and Country Head Sanjay Nayyar, Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Chairman and Managing Director Arun Balakrishnan, Ernst & Young CEO and Country Managing Partner Rajiv Memani and Thermax Chairperson Meher Pudumjee (who was also the Business Standard CEO of the Year for 2007-08).
Read about the achievements of the BS CEO of the Year and other winners in the BS 1000 magazine that is being distributed with Business Standard today.
India Inc may have faced one of its worst crises in 2008-09, but the heartening sign is that quite a few companies have been quick enough to get their act together. BS 1000 has chronicled the turnaround journey – how several companies rose to the challenge and changed the way they did business without compromising on corporate governance.
The magazine also details how after a year of pink slips and salary cuts, India Inc is back to doing what it does best: rewarding talent. India has been reporting the strongest hiring plans globally since the third quarter of 2008, something that is evident in the new-found confidence in campuses all over the country.
The most encouraging sign, however, is that there is no shortage of enterprising Indians who have grabbed a slice of the action and came up the curve fast. Meet them in the pages of BS 1000.
