Sanjay Agarwal: Out in the open

From a hi-profile e-trader to a rogue trader behind bars in less than 18 months. For Home Trade's Chairman Sanjay Agarwal, it's been a short-trip to perdition. When first launched amidst an advertising blitzkrieg featuring movie stars Hrithik Roshan and Shah Rukh Khan, and cricketing god Sachin Tendulkar, Home Trade hit instant stardom. Few knew what the company was meant to do, or why its stock on the Pune stock exchange was trading (between January and June 2000) at Rs 600 to Rs 890.

But last fortnight, the answer came out loud and clear. The Nagpur Co-operative Bank lodged a police complaint against a bunch of brokers, including Home Trade, stating that they had failed to deliver Rs 125.60 crore worth of government securities. Agarwal was caught in Kolkata and sent to jail, and Sunil Kedar, Chairman of Nagpur District Central Co-operative Bank has been arrested too. The 50-odd employees at Home Trade's Vashi office are devastated. Said a vice president, who's already put in his papers. ''It took us all by surprise and I have been trying to reach the directors since then.''

Had the regulators been any more alert, Home Trade's fall could have been foreseen. Its Mauritius-based promoter Euro Discover Technology Ventures, it seems, had little capital, and Home Trade, little in actual business. Unfortunately, Home Trade's stakeholders are discovering that a little too late.

-Abir Pal

OBITUARY
The grand old man of India's hotel industry passes away.

Raj Bahadur Mohan Singh Oberoi (1898-2002)

Eighty two years ago, a young man strode confidently through the front door of the nine-storeyed Cecil Hotel in Shimla, only to be thrown out by the hall porter with a stern ''No vacancies.'' Undeterred, the young man decided to wait for the manager to come home for his customary siesta. In the meantime, befriending a nearby shopkeeper, requested him to identify Grove, for that was the manager's name, on arrival. As soon as Grove came into sight, the young man walked up to him and said: ''I am looking for a job, Sir. Do you have a vacancy at the Cecil?'' A hard look greeted the 22-year-old village boy from Bhaun (now in Pakistan) as the Englishman's eyes absorbed the youth, the perfect knot of his tie, and the shine on his shoes. After a momentary silence, Grove muttered to the boy: ''See me at 3 this afternoon.''

That's how Mohan Singh Oberoi began his life as a clerk at Cecil for Rs 50 a month and went on to create a hotel empire that today spans seven countries, 37 luxury and first class hotels, employs 12,000 people, and had Rs 750 crore in turnover last year. On May 3, he died at the age of 103.

-Moinak Mitra

GODREJ
Godrej's Glow Of Growth
Double-digit growth in FMCG on the back of increased marketshares could well mean that Adi Godrej's consumer products business is on song, finally.

Adi Godrej: Good days

Double-digit growth isn't something you stumble upon routinely these days-surely not in the FMCG sector, as the Hindustan Lever Ltd (HLL) top brass will grudgingly testify. So how did Godrej Consumer Products Ltd (GCPL)-which was demerged from Godrej Soaps in end-2000 into a focused FMCG company-grow its sales by all of 10 per cent over the previous year, to Rs 514 crore?

Whilst comparisons with HLL-which has been unable to show double-digit growth for eight straight quarters now-would appear incongruous because of the difference in scale, Godrej's biggest achievement has been the ability to outshine the industry average. In soaps, for instance, even as the industry growth fell by 6 per cent, according to ORG, GCPL did better, seeing just a 2 per cent fall. GCPL's own figures suggest it did better: soap shipments surged 8 per cent in 2001-2002. In the process, soap marketshare inched up from 5.6 per cent last year to 5.8 per cent. Hair colour, which accounted for a quarter of total sales, was one of the biggest gainers, growing by 16 per cent. That resulted in a 45 per cent marketshare for GCPL. Red, though, is one colour that you won't associate with this company for some time to come.

-Brian Carvalho

SHIMNIT UTSCH INDIA
Plenty On This Plate
And you thought your car's number plate was just a humble piece of metal?

Getting a number plate changed may be a hassle for most vehicle owners, but for manufacturers of high-security number plates it's a huge opportunity. The market for number plates is estimated to touch $1 billion (or Rs 4,900 crore) by 2004. That's the lure for four global biggies-Erich Utsch AG, J.H. Tonnjes, and Hoffman, of Germany, and Netherlands' Mazon.

''We hope to grab a marketshare of 60 per cent,'' says Tapesh Bagati, Director (Operations), Shimnit Utsch India, a 50:50 joint venture between Shimnit India and Erich Utsch of Germany that has earmarked Rs 300 crore for a manufacturing facility at Taloja, near Mumbai.

For starters- by June 30, 2002-all new vehicles will have to sport a high security number plate. The old ones can make do by adhering to the specified colour code. But the action will get serious in two years (by June 30, 2004) when the high-security plates become mandatory for all vehicles. These plates will be reflective in nature, have a chromium-based hologram, a security inscript, a snap lock, and will have to be mounted only at the regional transport offices. And you thought it was only something with numbers and letters!

-Swati Prasad

The Coming Of The Right
Far-right regimes don't last long, but they are bad for business while they do. The recent resurgence in the right bodes ill for globalisation.

It's the coming of the right, the backlash to close to sixty-years of post-WWII globalisation. Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi inadvertently stumbled on it when he referred to the riots in Gujarat-following the killing of some Hindu pilgrims in Godhra-in the language of physics. Never mind that the puerile use of Newton's third law to defend tit-for-tat gestures is something even schoolchildren forsake by the time they are into the teens.

The events in Gujarat-still burning, as this essay is being written-may not have been caused by globalisation but surely, there must be a common thread somewhere in the frightening tapestry of the early 21st century politics? There is Modi in Gujarat (why even the BJP, the main constituent of the governing coalition in India leans to the right, albeit in a patchy, liberal sort of way), Jean-Marie Le Pen (thankfully, he lost the Presidential race) in France, Edmund Stoiber (who may not lose the race for chancellorship) in Germany, and Gianfranco Fini (the deputy prime minister with statist beliefs) in Italy, all members of the isolationist, far-right. Even Denmark and Norway, those model welfare states, haven't been spared: the coalitions ruling the two include populist, anti-immigrant, far-right parties.

At the turn of the century, the emergence of China as a global economic power, was supposed to be the one event that would reshape the contours of how the world did business. Then 9-11 happened, and Islamic fundamentalism was written into the script. Neither will affect globalisation the way the coming of the right-its resurgence may have something to do with 9-11-will.

Circa 2002, it is easy to hate minorities. Most global economies are either in recession or at the beginning of a painful recovery from one. Jobs are scarce, and the global nineties seem to have left certain sections of society better off than the rest. That presents rabble-rousers with ideal conditions to foment trouble. ''Indians are taking away your jobs.'' ''Old people are getting mugged by immigrants.'' ''They are changing the very face of our culture.'' ''If they want to live here, they need to adopt our ways.''

Germany, in particular, should recognise the import of words such as these: it has heard them before. The good news is that far-right regimes don't last. The great Roman civilisation eventually fell. The Nazis were consigned to the dust-heaps of history. Only, they do enough damage by the time they go. Business, especially, cannot thrive in a rightist environment. At the core of all far-right parties is an obsession with conformity, and a hatred of those who are different-African Americans, Jews, immigrants, religious minorities, or gays. This is a brand of orthodoxy that discourages diversity.

Businesses, everywhere, thrive on diversity. It isn't rules that force companies to be equal-opportunity employers; it's necessity. Diversity stimulates creativity. Those companies that want to participate in the global marketplace-most do-need to build a multicultural, multiethnic organisation. An organisation staffed with wasps won't do. Nor will one replete with Iyengars.

Those companies that want to be global need to speak the language of business. And today, the language of business is American. It could be Mandarin tomorrow, just as in the eighties, it threatened to be Japanese, but today, it is American. Ever wonder why anti-globalisation protests pick on American symbols, Coke, Pepsi, KFC, McDonald's, and Cargill?

Globalisation is no angel. It threatens the way we live, how we work, what we eat, wear, and read, and our very identities. But it is the way ahead. When the French intelligentsia lams Vivendi's CEO Jean-Marie Messier for being too American in his work style, it is perhaps ruing the death of the French way of business, being anxious about the loss of the French identity in business. Le Pen and his ilk play on similar fears. And their first victim is commerce.

-R. Sukumar