Revving up: Bajaj is catching up furiously

In December last year, during a dealer conference onboard a cruise ship with a bunch of Bajaj Auto dealers, Rajiv Bajaj, Managing Director of Bajaj Auto, declared that he would overtake his foreign competition in India in the short term. But even the projected sales charts that Bajaj's crack marketing team led by S. Sridhar put up didn't quite foresee that happening anytime soon. Even as this piece is being written, the Pune-based two- and three-wheeler major is behind the Delhi-based Hero Honda, but it sure is catching up. Last month (August), Bajaj Auto sold 180,570 motorcycles versus Hero Honda's 208,576. That's still a gap of more than 20,000, but the fact is until a year ago Hero outsold Bajaj almost 2:1. What helped? Apart from the labour trouble at its Gurgaon plant, Hero's problem boils down to a dull product line for the last few years and capacity constraints. For instance, Hero's August sales reflect a 15 per cent slump. (The company is setting up two new plants and plans to launch seven new bikes.)

Led by its young managing director, Bajaj, in contrast, has been busy churning out spiffy new bikes like the Pulsar. Just the same, the Warwick-educated Bajaj will be the first to admit that all his ideas haven't worked-the 'Wind' could not be saved despite slick advertising. Yet, the fact is his hit rate is hurting Hero a lot. And it isn't just sales. Bajaj has also turned his company into the most profitable two-wheeler manufacturer (Hero's margins have been falling). No one at Bajaj Auto is reaching for the champagne bottle just yet. "It's one thing to catch up with them, and another thing to overtake them," says a senior Bajaj executive. Just the sort of humility Bajaj needs in this race.

-Kushan Mitra

NUMBERS OF NOTE

Rs 929 crore: The amount of money lying with banks in accounts which have not been operated for 10 years or more, according to RBI

3 bottles: The average annual per capita consumption of colas in Kerala. It is 55 in Delhi

5.5 million: The number of people who have a BlackBerry worldwide

128: The number of pilots who resigned from Air India, Indian Airlines and Alliance Airways between 2004 and 2006

Rs 1,366: The average amount of debt per family in Delhi as against the all India average of Rs 8,694, according to a report by the Directorate of Economics and Statistics

1.8 million: The number of notebooks with faulty batteries (made by Sony, again) that Apple is currently recalling

$26 billion (Rs 1,22,200 crore): The size of the global duty-free industry

74: The number of Indian films that were released in the UK in 2005; only 61 British productions were released

4.32 lakh: The number of posts lying vacant in various central government ministries and departments in the country

856: The number of new civilian aircraft (valued at over $72 billion) India will require over the next 20 years, according to Boeing

€12 billion (Rs 72,000 crore): Value of carbon credits traded between January and June 2006

15-24 per cent: The proportion of CVs in India that are fake, according to MeritTrac, a Bangalore-based skill assessment and HR consultancy firm

3,000 sq. ft: Size of Wrangler's 'largest store in the world' which opened in Bangalore recently. The store is built on the lines of Wrangler's new retail format

NOTED

RANKED: By Forbes, PepsiCo Chief Executive designate, the India-born Indra Nooyi, #4 in its annual listing of the world's most powerful women after German Chancellor Angela Merkel, US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, and China's Vice Premier Wu Yi. Congress President Sonia Gandhi is ranked #13.

FILED: By 12.6 million Indians, the highest ever, personal income tax returns. Last year, 7.7 million Indians had filed returns. The new figure still remains just around 1 per cent of India's total population.

RESIGNED: From his position as Chief Investment Officer of Azim Premji Investments, the firm through which the Chairman of Wipro manages his personal wealth and finances, Mrunmay Das. Das is reportedly considering offering his wealth-management services to a portfolio of clients. Prior to his stint at Azim Premji Investments, Das was with DSP Merrill Lynch (and BNP Paribas).

SOLD: By the various family members who own the Bangalore-based Nilgiris dairy farm that runs an eponymous chain of stores, largely in the southern part of the country, a controlling (in excess of 51 per cent) stake to private equity firm Actis.

LIFTED: By Securities and Exchange Board of India, the ban on Mumbai brokerage Motilal Oswal Securities from opening fresh demat accounts in the wake of the recent demat scam.

ACQUIRED: By Apollo Health Street, a healthcare business process outsourcing firm that is part of the Apollo Hospitals Group (Chairman P.C. Reddy, left), the US-based Armanti Financial Services (AFS) LLC for $31 million (Rs 145.7 crore). With this acquisition, Apollo becomes one of the top 10 healthcare revenue cycle management companies in the US.

PROPOSED: By AMD, the world's second largest chip maker (Intel is the largest), a $500 million (Rs 2,350 crore) investment in SemIndia's proposed chip manufacturing facility near Hyderabad. The US chip giant will also provide technology to SemIndia for the manufacturing facility. EMS firm Flextronics will also take a minority stake in the facility.

BACK TO ACADEMIA

The youngest man (40 in 2003 when he took over) and the only Indian to serve as Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund, Raghuram Rajan has announced his desire to leave the organisation in early 2007 and return to his post (he is currently on leave) as professor of finance at the Chicago Graduate School of Business. Rajan, an engineer-MBA, with the perfect IIT (Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi), IIM (Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad) combination (he also has a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), has been with IMF since late 2003; his well received book Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists (co-authored with another Chicago GSB professor Luigi Zingales) was published in 2004.

INDIAN ART GOING GLOBAL

Indian artists are increasingly becoming mainstream across the world. And Christie's, the world's leading art auctioneer, is both fuelling and feeding on this trend. It will hold an auction of works by Indian masters such as F.N. Souza, Tyeb Mehta, Ram Kumar, Sayed Hyder Raza and Ganesh Pyne, among others, in New York on September 20.

"Our goal is to make Indian art international. We are, therefore, showcasing it in different parts of the world," says Christie's International Director for Asian Art and Head of Indian and South-East Asian Art, Hugo K. Weihe.

"There are regular auctions of Modern and Contemporary Indian Art in New York every year," says Ganieve Grewal, Christie's India representative. The most encouraging development: non-Indian art collectors are now increasingly showing interest in and acquiring paintings by big name Indian artists. "At an auction in Dubai last March, Indian paintings accounted for over 75 per cent of the total sales of $8.4 million," adds Roddy Ropnr, Christie's Business Development Director, Asia.

The auction house arranged a preview in Delhi of 40 of the 170 works it will put on the block later this month.

-Amit Mukherjee