Monday, September 10, 2012

P. R. Somasundaram, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Lakshmi Vilas Bank (LVB)

In a tête-à-tête with B&E’s Mona Mehta, P. R. Somasundaram, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Lakshmi Vilas Bank (LVB) speaks about the growing importance of retail banking in the Country and the bank’s expansion plans to exploit the opportunities coming its way.

B&E: What are the new marketing initiatives that you are focusing on to increase your customer base in the retail banking arena?
PRS: LVB is an 83 year-old private bank with 1.64 million satisfied customers. In order to increase the base further we are concentrating on wealth management by offering related products and services. We are looking at steady growth in the retail lending space through secured lending measures like mortgage lending. However, as a policy of the bank, we have temporarily restrained ourselves from the unsecured categories like credit cards and personal loans.

B&E: With the number of participants increasing, competition in the Indian banking sector has moved up to a different level altogether. Banks are now competing to reach out to the huge unbanked population. How is LVB planning to deal with the situation?
PRS: The new management’s focus is to reposition LVB as a new generation bank and make it a top performer in terms of customer service, efficiency, productivity and profitability in the next 3 years. And to achieve it we are planning to start a housing finance company, increase our national presence, and leverage on our expertise in the IT domain. We have also tied up with LIC and Bajaj for life and non-life insurance distribution. The insurance venture is taking off really well for us. Apart from the centralised plans, we are also looking at drafting a town-wise strategy soon, particularly for the semi urban areas where we currently have 105 branches.

B&E: You have only 180 ATMs of your own. Don’t you think this will be a big roadblock in your retail dreams?
PRS: It’s true that we have only 180 ATMs, but at the same time we are also linked to other banks. So our customers can actually use 54,000 other ATMs belonging to various banks. Nevertheless, we are adding more ATMs every month and expect that our own ATM network will cross the 300 mark in the next 2-3 years.

B&E: Apart from CASA, how is LVB planning to strengthen its portfolio in areas like housing loan, auto loan et al?
PRS: Talking about auto loans, we do not intend to enter the 4-wheeler or 2-wheeler segment any time soon as these have collection challenges that may not be ideal in our current set up. However, we do have a presence, though small, in the transport vehicles segment. And we have plans to take it further. So, we are currently piloting a project that is expected to create a mid size opportunity for us in the segment. In the housing segment, we already have sizable portfolio and intend to grow it significantly through alliances; preferably through a Housing Finance Company. Apart from these, our new management team is now focusing aggressively on growing all business verticals of the bank and retail banking products. We have also included loans to MSME sector among our focus areas.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
 
IIPM : The B-School with a Human Face
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Saturday, September 08, 2012

Greek Odyssey

Aniruddha Bahal’s The Emissary is a rocking chariot ride

Aniruddha Bahal’s The Emissary has grand ambitions. Pretty much as grand as one of the historical figures who appears in the book – Alexander The Great. Bahal, whose earlier effort Bunker 13 (an espionage thriller) found a worldwide audience (and also fetched him the Bad Sex writing award; consequently taken very sportingly in his stride by the author) writes this time on a slice of history in ancient Olympia exploring the universal and timeless theme of love and betrayal. He reasons that “The basic human emotions still remain the same. Adventure, revenge, hate, love, war. We haven’t transcended these categories to a robotic existence yet.”

The Emissary opens in Macedonia in ancient Greece during the time of Alexander the Great. Nicanor, an ace chariot racer, is killed by his own horses in a plot hatched by rival charioteer Argus. That leaves Seluecus (who’s also the narrator of the tale) distraught and in his quest for revenge he gets sucked into the mire that is the world of deceit and politics. The presence of Alexander The Great in the backdrop of the narrative makes it riveting reading. Basically, history suddenly seems intriguing and fun. Bahal tells Business and Economy that the idea was “sparked off (after) a conversation with Sir V S Naipaul who strongly urged me to read a lot of history to refine my fiction.” The conversation and the challenge laid by Sir Vidia “speed tracked” Bahal “towards the process of reading the history of ancient Greece.” He confesses that “the period had an existent charm for me. It was while reading about that period in the works of Thucydides, Arrian and Herodotus that the idea started evolving in my head of setting something in the time of Alexander The Great.” What results is a very good and eminently enjoyable piece of historical fiction, narrated in fairly contemporary language keeping the readability high.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
 
IIPM : The B-School with a Human Face
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Tuesday, September 04, 2012

Lesson #1: Don’t implement Panic Price-cuts during a slowdown; It kills the brand

Travel bags and retailing have never formed quite the blend that deserved a strong mention. But then, if Louis Vuitton – a traditional suitcase maker – could make the jump, why can’t others? Brands like Samsonite are attempting that, though. B&E catches up with Samsonite’s South Asia retail head, N. P. Singh, for inputs on current conditions and strategies

The plus point of the franchisee model is that it enables the retailer to have a pan-India presence. But there is the other side to this coin too. Malpractices by any franchisee can spoil the image of the retail brand. Add to this the dangers posed by reduced consumer spending. N. P. Singh, who heads the retail operations of Samsonite in the South Asian region, talks to B&E about the franchisee model in Indian Retail, the opportunities, the challenges faced so far and his expectations from the industry.

B&E: After IT, retail was considered to be the next sunrise sector of the Indian economy. But the slowdown came down hard on the sector and wiped out many hopes and promises. Do you still claim that Indian retail will bloom?
N. P. Singh (NPS):linkages that retail has with other sectors, and the widespread impact of this sector on the economy in question. India is no exception. But organised retail still holds a miniscule portion of the overall sector in India, so it would be early to claim that a boom will occur. But then, yes, post-slowdown, there appears to be great business opportunities mushrooming in the Indian retail industry as well.

B&E: Talking about new business opportunities, there are foreign brands that are making news in the Indian retail landscape. Are we betting big here?
NPS: The franchisee model presents very strong business opportunities, be it domestic brands or international. But of course, with the global (and Indian) economy bouncing back, foreign brands are increasingly looking to tap the pots of riches that Indian consumers are willing to present. Over the coming quarters, there will be many more foreign brands that will set up shop in India through the franchisee route. Big opportunities await Indian retail in this respect.


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Monday, September 03, 2012

CAN RONNIE SCREWVALA FINISH WHAT SUBHASH CHANDRA STARTED?

UTV IS NOW ONE OF THE LARGEST PRODUCTION HOUSES IN ASIA...BUT NOT THE BIGGEST YET! CAN RONNIE SCREWVALA AND HIS TEAM MAKE UTV THE FACE OF INDIA TO THE MEDIA WORLD? B&E’S SHEPHALI BHATT PROVIDES A DEEP INVESTIGATION FROM RIGHT INSIDE UTV WITH EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEWS FROM UTV’S TOP MANAGEMENT

It was a period that saw two little known entrepreneurs make what can be considered their first indelible impressions in the business arena; albeit in markedly different ways. The year was 1981 when a very young man called Ronnie Screwvala started a three-hour cable video channel for households in Maker Towers in Cuffe Parade, one of the suave areas of Mumbai. He charges subscribers `200 per month and realises that there is money in the making. He expands beyond the towers; and within no time, Network, his cable service, gets thousands of subscribers. Within five years, after having made the money he wants to, Ronnie sells off his business and in 1986, convinces a staid old monopoly government television channel to take his services in providing programming content. Doordarshan takes up his offer; and Ronnie even starts presenting shows himself. In 1990, having had enough of the government association, he jumps ship and forms UTV, a company focused on provided content to satellite and cable channels globally.

Interestingly, even Subhash Chandra’s story started more or less in 1981, when he set up Essel Packaging Company after visiting a packaging exhibition. While rigmarole business was pretty satisfactory, Chandra saw a latent opportunity in the television arena, where India had only one Doordarshan. In 1992, Chandra, realizing the potential of television and cable, takes a huge risk and launches Zee TV. With no past experience of content programming, Chandra starts looking out for outsourced suppliers of world-class content. He searches for people harbouring a similar vision to him; and purely on gut feel, hands over a mammoth 520 episode contract to a young, highly enthusiastic man whose only experience is starting a local cable network and working for Doordarshan. The twain between Chandra and Ronnie Screwala becomes indelibly inseparable.

Within 6-7 years, Zee TV becomes one of the most popular TV channels in India and expands its reach across continents. What CNN was to America then, Zee becomes for India. And then competition from South Asia enters, with Murdoch owned channels like Star TV trying to ride over the Indian satellite TV space hook, line and sinker. Zee TV takes up the challenge superbly and with its fantastic programming, becomes the ultimate epitome of Indian business aspirations and Indian enterprise in the media and entertainment industry in the home market at that time. But despite being in the same business, there was something that characteristically differentiated Ronnie Screwala from Subhash Chandra.


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Saturday, September 01, 2012

CONTROVERSY: INDIAN MAP

In Jan 2010, NatGeo was warned by the I&B ministry for deliberately exhibiting wrong maps of India and was threatened with stringent action if non-compliance was continued. Let off then, NatGeo continues its misrepresentation! What does the government plan to do now?

But to pick on National Geographic singularly would be wrong, as many other notable agencies mirror this behaviour – including, as mentioned before, CNN, BBC, Lonely Planet, Wikipedia, Google and the quite infamous Central Intelligence Agency. All of these agencies currently carry Indian maps on their websites that are rampant equivocations of reality, yet are freely available from within Indian boundaries.

While the very first result of Google’s image search (for a keyword search of “India map”) gives a wrong map of India, CIA’s World Factbook Report has shown northern Kashmir as being cut off from India and being a part of Pakistan and China. Even the US Department of State endorses a map quite similar to the CIA map on their official India advisory. In the advisory, the Department mentions flagrantly, “The US considers all of the former princely state of Kashmir to be disputed territory.” CNN endorses this viewpoint and has gone a step ahead to term the entire J&K as “disputed.”

One has to realise that these are leading agencies of the world (for example, National Geographic is the world’s largest read magazine published in 32 languages with a mammoth monthly readership of over fifty million; Lonely Planet is the world’s largest travel guide book; Wikipedia is the world’s most referred encyclopaedia; Google the most used search engine; CNN/BBC the largest global media channels) and continued misrepresentation of the Indian map in these forums can only lead to global perception changing negatively against India. The nation necessarily needs to take quick and extreme steps to arrest this situation.

A call for action has to now come directly from the Prime Minister’s office that raises the diplomatic ire to the highest levels possible to enforce immediate and instant change. If compliance is still absent from these agencies, then the Indian government should ban these media/information/government agencies and immediately block access to their channels, both on and off the web.

On the other hand, if the government believes that such a continued misrepresentation by global agencies – some like Google and NatGeo which have already been warned – is not of grave concern, then it should call a spade a spade, tell the Indian public that what is lost, is lost forever... and label itself the most unpatriotic government in the history of independent India!


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