Business Today Net Special

ABB's New Makeover

CEO Ravi Uppal says he's going to double his company's business volumes in four years. But that's clearly going to be an uphill task given the current global slowdown.

By Roshni Jayakar

ABB's Ravi Uppal

On October 1, 2001, Ravi Uppal started his second innings at the Rs 793.27-crore ABB India. In a little over 30 days that he has been at the helm, he has toured all the eight manufacturing locations in India and met up with more than 4,000 employees of the company motivating and inspiring them to follow the 3S philosophy--systems, spirit and speed. The objective: doubling of business volumes in three-to-four years.

The 49-year-old engineer from IIT (Delhi) succeeds K.K. Kaura as managing director of ABB India, a power and automation technologies major. He returns to the company (quit ABB in 1996 after a 16-years stint, as executive veep and member of country management board) after a gap of four years during which time as managing director of Volvo he set up the Volvo operations in India.

Sure, in the first month itself Uppal announced quite upbeat results for the third quarter of 2001 --- 16 per cent growth in revenue to Rs 226.4 crore and 10 per cent increase in net profit to Rs 14.7 crore. While Uppal remains optimistic about delivering "strong and profitable growth' given the economic slowdown both domestic and global, its going to be tough times for him.

And Uppal is unfazed and already at work. Given the absence of large projects at present, Uppal's strategy while continuing to pursue turnkey projects, is to "look for new windows of opportunity". And from being project dependent, ABB is shifting its focus to service, standard products and exports so as to increase their share of contribution to the business portfolio. Thereby balancing the product mix and minimising the impact of cyclical and economic downturns. Uppal explains, all of ABB's products have long life. But they require support during the lifetime of the product. So, ABB will provide support in the form of annual maintenance contract, consultancy or upgradation of existing networks from time to time and so on. Says Uppal:" Our efforts are to position service as standalone entity within the ambit of our business.

At the same time, plans are to pursue a more proactive and aggressive marketing approach so as to leverage ABB's domain expertise , brand equity and technological strength and grow with the customers. The organisation is being realigned to make it more customer centric so as to make it easier to do business with and deliver greater customer value.

Leading with a clear vision and encouraging youthfulness and spirited performance, Uppal says:" We are in an age where speed is everything..Even Elephants must learn to dance." Looks like Uppal will make the `ABB' elephant dance.

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