The former Ranbaxy CEO, set to launch a newspaper in Gurgaon, says he will pore over every word filed and every headline suggested but maintains journalists are better than analysts.
I am a free bird now,” says Atul Sobti, the former CEO of Ranbaxy and wannabe newspaper baron, and orders gin (Bombay Sapphire) and tonic. He certainly looks the part, with no tie, (though he’s wearing a dark suit), a ready grin and stories untold from his past. It’s a happy change from his days at Ranbaxy when he grappled with legal issues in the United States, erosion of profits and fall in market share, writes Bhupesh Bhandari.
Spectra, in the Leela Kempinski at Gurgaon, is spacious — 16,000 square feet, tables for 225 guests and global cuisine. The restaurant overlooks a patch of greenery, a miracle amid the glass, concrete and steel of the suburb. Winter has begun to set in. The afternoon is dark with rain clouds. The bleak view doesn’t bother Sobti. His blueprint for the newspaper is more or less ready, complete with the question I half expected: “Do you know somebody in his 50s who lives in Gurgaon to…” So, it will be a paper for Gurgaon with 80 per cent local news. He will have a staff of 15 to 20 people who will put the paper together, fetch advertisements and sell it to hawkers before dawn every day. Breakeven, he says, will take place in the first year. The business plan has been approved by his daughters and his Bengali wife.
That decides what we will eat: Fish and more fish. We order prawn tikka for starters along with fish (bhetki) and chips and chicken tikka pasta. Sobti says that he has turned the idea of a newspaper in his mind over and over again for the last ten years. He had even approached a businessman some years ago to start a newspaper but was asked to wait and watch. At the moment, he is funding the newspaper fully. He has some names in mind for the newspaper but will disclose the final one only towards the end of this month. By then he will be clear in his mind on the right combination of editorial and advertisement. The circulation he has in mind is 8,000 to 10,000 copies.
“Your newspaper,” I ask Sobti, “can guzzle a lot of money, especially when all the top dailies of Delhi have a Guragon supplement. Won’t it make sense to get an investor like the Singh brothers?”, referring to his previous employers. That could happen in the second phase of the project, Sobti says, and he could get funds from the businessmen he admires, like Azim Premji. The second phase, of course, could mean a Kolkata edition, the city he loves the most. “I have been to so many countries, but where will you find a place like Park Street that offers 25 different cuisines in a space of 200 meters,” he says.
Every businessman has had an issue with the media at some time or the other. Many of them, after they have blurted out something inappropriate, complain of being misquoted. “What was your experience with the media,” I ask Sobti. “And how will that impact the way your newspaper gets done?” Sobti says most reporters wrote truthful reports on him, though he often found the headlines sensational. So, in his newspaper, he will pore over not only every word that is filed but also every headline that is suggested. But journalists, he says, are better than analysts because their questions are unbiased — analysts, on their part, want to know what can move the stock up or down.
The fish are fresh and the skewers nicely turned. We order more fish: Ajwain mahi tikka. It has a distinctly North-Indian name and feel, but fish nevertheless.
Sobti has never worked in the same industry twice. He has been on the rolls of Xerox, HCL, Hero Honda and Ranbaxy, each a different line of products. I take him to his Hero Honda days. The two partners in the motorcycle company, Honda and the Munjals, have decided to part ways; were there signs of discord during his time? With its 26 per cent share of the dividends, Sobti says, Honda always felt that it didn’t get full credit for its contribution to the company’s growth. It was, after all, providing all the technology. That is why Hero Honda seldom featured in its international publicity campaigns. “The Japanese are very good at engineering and manufacturing, but not so good in marketing and finance,” he says. Sobti claims he worked out an arrangement between the two partners, which worked well but only for a short period of time.
Will Hero Honda, I ask him what everybody else wants to know, survive without Honda? Sobti reckons it could be tough. When I point out that TVS has done well, though Suzuki exited the company many years ago, he says rehabilitation of such a divorced venture can take long, even as much as 10 years.
I ask him to compare Pawan Kant Munjal of Hero Honda with Malvinder Singh (he, along with his brother, Shivinder Singh, sold Ranbaxy to Daiichi Sankyo of Japan in August 2008). Munjal, according to Sobti, is an introvert, while Singh is outgoing and aggressive. It was an open secret at Ranbaxy that Singh and Sobti differed on the direction Ranbaxy should take — while Singh was gung ho about overseas markets, Sobti wanted to consolidate first in India. Singh left Ranbaxy in 2009; Sobti seems to have had his way after that. He hired thousands of medical representatives and moved the India business from Gurgaon to Mumbai. Why? “Almost all top pharmaceutical companies are based in Mumbai,” says Sobti. “It then becomes easier to hire people.”
Was he, I ask, taken aback when Singh decided to sell Ranbaxy to Daiichi Sankyo? Sobti says he was the happiest person in the whole company when the announcement was made. He had for long pushed Singh an alliance with a large Japanese company. One reason was that Japan is the second-largest pharmaceutical market in the world after the United States, and most generic companies like Ranbaxy had hitherto ignored it. It is well known that after the first talks, Daiichi Sankyo’s interest in Ranbaxy grew steadily till it made an offer the Singh brothers could not resist.
Immediately after the deal, Ranbaxy ran into regulatory problems in the United States. The Food & Drug Administration found its facilities not up to the mark. Exports to that country have therefore taken a severe beating. Sobti says the matter first came to light in 2006 and still lingers. There have been murmurs in the past that Big Pharma has hit back on generic companies like Ranbaxy because their pipeline for new products has run dry, and they need to flog the existing products a lot more; for that, it is essential to keep generics away. Malvinder Singh had said in 2008 that he was under pressure from some Western pharmaceutical companies to rescind the Daiichi Sankyo deal. The pieces of the jigsaw begin to fall in place.
Ranbaxy, I fire the final question, had a number of followers of the Radhasoami Satsang on its board and senior executive positions during the Singh days. Is he also a Satsangi? Sobti looks at the spread of fish and alcohol on the table (I am on Kingfisher beer) and remarks: “Do I look like a follower?” We call it a day. The valet had given us chits to get stamped at the restaurant, or else we would have had to pay Rs 100 each, to ensure that we spend money and don’t use the common facilities for chitchat. The valet gets his Prado and Sobti, the latest newspaper man in town, drives away.
