A low-profile tycoon: Quietly but steadily, Jaipuria has moved into a clutch of booming industries

The Jaipurias are considered old money in Delhi. They've been around for generations now, but have never quite been there. While other rich Marwari clans, who started out around the same time, oversaw the rise and decline of pan-Indian business empires, the Jaipurias were content being anonymous but wealthy satraps of their privately-held kingdom.

That is changing. Ravi K. Jaipuria, 50, has quietly built critical mass in his clutch of privately-held companies, and is now spreading his wings wider. Best known as a successful Pepsi bottler, he has over the last 10 years, diversified into fast foods, liquor, real estate, hotels, education, ice creams and dairy products. His topline: Rs 1,200 crore. If that sounds mid-sized, sample this: he plans to grow more than four-fold by 2010 to Rs 5,000 crore.

Jaipuria is taking small, incremental steps towards realising his grand vision-there is no grandiose announcement, little media frenzy and negligible hype. There can't be; he is a franchisee-albeit a big one-and not the principal in most of his businesses. In September, Jaipuria opened his first coffee outlet in Delhi's Connaught Place as a franchisee of UK coffee chain Costa Coffee. Devyani International, his vehicle for this venture, holds the franchisee rights for the whole country. The plan: invest Rs 150 crore to set up 300 Costa outlets across India over the next three years.

In August, Jaipuria kicked off his brewery operations in Mauritius in partnership with Raman Sood of the Eros Group and Avtar Lit, a London-based NRI who owns the Sunrise Radio Group. The business model is again that of a franchisee, this time of the world's largest beer-maker, the Belgium-based InBev. The total investment in Mauritius could be about Rs 50 crore, but the market is promising. The only other player, Pheonix Breweries, has been a monopoly for the last 30 years. There's more: Jaipuria's also negotiating with InBev for the franchisee rights to its best-selling global beer brands like Stella Artois, Brahma, and Beck's for India. "We hope to close the deal in three months," he says. Once he has this agreement in the bag, he plans to either take over some existing units (several bottling units will be up for grabs following UB's takeover of Shaw Wallace) or go in for a mix of greenfield and contract bottling.

Then, six months ago, he forayed into the spirits business by picking up a 26 per cent stake in the Ramesh Vangal-promoted Mason & Summers, an Indian-made foreign liquor (IMFL) company. But here, he's more likely to play the role of a large investor than that of a hands-on owner-manager. Besides, he's also set up Lemon Tree Hotels, a four-star hotel chain (priced in the range of Rs 3,000-4,000 a room/night), in partnership with former Taj Group honcho Patu Keswani. It's doing roaring business; its two properties in Gurgaon (94 rooms) are witnessing almost 100 per cent occupancy. There are plans to add six new hotels over the next year (two in Pune and one each in Delhi, Goa, Chennai and Mumbai). The target: 1,000 rooms by 2007.

All these businesses follow more or less the same model. All are scalable, short-gestation businesses that start generating cash almost from day one. So how does Jaipuria run his various businesses? "I involve myself more in the bottling business (it is his flagship, accounting for half of the group turnover) but not the others," says Jaipuria. These are managed by professionals; he only decides the bigger picture.

But the venture he (in partnership with his eldest brother S.K. Jaipuria) is really betting big on is real estate. The brothers are developing two large properties-four million square feet of residential apartments and half-a-million square feet of commercial space-in Gurgaon and Indirapuram (near Ghaziabad) that will be ready in 2006; and 90 per cent of the 1,200 apartments are already sold out. But Jaipuria's real ambitions are in the northern hinterland-in Saharanpur, Moradabad, Agra and Ghaziabad-where he is developing large colonies. All told, the brothers are investing Rs 750 crore in all their real estate projects combined. Says Jaipuria: "I am upbeat on real estate. There is a huge market for quality housing in India."

If you've already lost count of the number of businesses Jaipuria is in, here's another one: he has ploughed Rs 100 crore into education. He is the franchisee (what else?) for the Delhi Public Schools (DPS) in Gurgaon and Jaipur. He also runs two Montessori schools in the National Capital Region (NCR) under franchise from London's Modern Montessori International. "We are making money in education, but it's owned by a trust; the idea is to plough the money we earn from these schools back into education," says Jaipuria, whose two DPS franchises have 7,000 students.

So who is this man? Jaipuria is the youngest of three brothers-elder brothers S.K. and C.K. Jaipuria are also Pepsi bottlers-who hail from one of Delhi's oldest business families. Unlike many others that have broken up, the three brothers still live under one roof, in the sprawling 90-year-old family mansion on Delhi's hyper-expensive Prithviraj Road. Their father, C.L. Jaipuria, controlled the Bank of Rajasthan till 1994 (it, subsequently, went to the Tayals). But bottling has been their mainstay for decades. They were bottlers for Coca-Cola till it was forced to leave the country in 1977, after which they moved to Thums Up (owned by Parle's Ramesh Chauhan then). The family started bottling for Pepsi when the cola major set up shop in the country in 1989 and has remained with it since.

Pizza Hut: Adding an outlet every month

The youngest Jaipuria had migrated to Montreal, Canada, in the 1970s. There, he started dabbling in real estate and textiles, which he imported from India. Jaipuria-he's still a non-resident Indian (NRI) and, therefore, spends six months a year outside the country-moved back to India in the late 1980s and joined the family business. "I still have small business interests in textiles and real estate in Montreal," says Jaipuria, who got an opportunity to carve a distinct identity for himself in India after the family's amicable property partition in 1991.

But is he spreading himself too thin? Jaipuria doesn't think so. "I'm essentially in two businesses-consumer products (which includes soft drinks, fast foods, ice creams, beer and so on) and real estate," he explains. His Varun Beverages, he claims, has 10 per cent share of the 400 million cases-a-year market for aerated soft drinks in India, and is Pepsi's largest bottler. But the trouble here is that the cola market is shrinking. So, though, he won't admit it, the diversification spree described above could be a strategy to minimise his dependence on the beverages business.

His diversifications are paying off, there's no question on that. His company, Devyani International, which has the rights for Pizza Hut in north and east India, already has 46 restaurants up and running; and it's adding an additional outlet every month. Says Vikas Atri, CEO of Papa John's, an American pizza chain that is setting up shop in the country early next year: "Pizza Hut faces no threats in India, yet." And that's thanks mainly to you know who.

Jaipuria also has big plans for Cream Bell, his ice cream brand. Currently available across north India, it is ranked #5 in Delhi behind Mother Dairy, Amul, Kwality Walls and Vadilal. Jaipuria, however, is optimistic. "The ice cream business is growing at such a frenetic pace that we ran out of capacity sometime ago. Our sales will double from Rs 50 crore to Rs 100 crore next year," he says. The long-term plan: extend the Cream Bell brand to a range of dairy products like yoghurt, paneer, butter, ghee and cheese. The company is setting up a plant in Baddi in Himachal Pradesh for this purpose. "This plant alone will generate sales of Rs 100 crore a year," claims Jaipuria.

He has lined up big ticket investments in coffee chains, fast foods, real estate, hotels, breweries and so on, but where does he raise the funds for all this? He says he will largely depend on internal accruals and debt, but will look at a private placement sometime in future. However, the most immediate possibility is the public listing of the hotels business (Lemon Tree). "I am not in a hurry to raise funds for my foods businesses. I am looking at attaining a critical mass of at least 200 restaurant outlets before going in for an initial public offering."

But Jaipuria is clearly a man in a hurry. His deal with Costa Coffee is a case in point. He was talking to Starbucks, another global coffee chain, for some time. But the Seattle-based Starbucks wasn't ready to bring down its prices (Rs 150-a-cup) for India, so Jaipuria went and signed up with Costa Coffee instead. That's so typical of the man: you either run with him or get left behind.