You could call them the lost generation. Especially after their fathers almost did them in. Running to ground a massive industrial empire on Delhi’s eastern periphery, Modinagar, built from scratch over 50 long years, first by the late Rai Bahadur Gujar Mal Modi, and then, his brother Kedar Nath and several sons and nephews.
When the Modis, once among India’s biggest corporate houses, split in January 1989, their individual businesses remained among India’s most daunting, making everything from lanterns to sugar, soaps, spirits, textiles, carpets, cigarettes, cement, steel, tyres, photocopiers, fax machines, computers...whatever! In collaboration with the world’s biggest nameplates.
Under the ubiquitous Modi brand name. Then came the nineties. And the house that Gujar Mal built collapsed. Even as the brothers refused to pay bankers their dues and reneged on tax obligations and promises to the market. One by one their companies turned sick. Once blue chips, Modi Rubber and Modipon went on a slide. And Modinagar soon resembled a ghost town. The Rai Bahadur’s descendants, KK, VK, SK, BK, UK, MK, YK and DK, once the cynosure of corporate cognoscenti, gradually saw their initials fading from newspaper front pages. The Modis had themselves to blame. You can sense the pain of the nextgen Modis, most of them in their teens, or even younger when the split took place. “Their mistakes were lack of professionalism and hoarding of wealth. Instead of trying to create wealth, they wanted the companies all for themselves,” repents Kapil, 25, son of DK, Gujar Mal’s nephew.
So where is Kapil headed now? For that matter, what’s the third generation of Modis up to these days? Perhaps, you imagine them sitting in their gardens, twiddling their thumbs at a bleak future. But, jump across the fence into the Modi household and they are actually doing quite the opposite. ET spent eight weeks tracking down the nextgen Modis, talking to 16 of the 24 there are. In and around Delhi, in Kolkata and Mumbai, and even distant New York and Harvard. Missing out only on those who are either too young or still not ready to talk. (See family tree to locate who’s who). And here’s what ET found. Even as they went about destroying their wealth and shredding their inheritance to bits, Gujar Mal’s several sons and nephews packed off their children to distant centres of learning, investing in a future they could call their own, free from a sullied family tag. And now, they are back. And, as if in revenge, each of the 16 ET spoke to is busy building the foundation of his or her exclusive domain in search of excellence. Dipping into the family coffers to make a beginning, because the banks stopped funding Modi's businesses a long time ago.
Yet, it will be a while before 23-year-old Karan, son of SK, really gets started. He’s just back from Regent’s College, London, with a first-class BBA degree in international business. For now, Karan’s busy planning to bring bottled Scotch to India, hoping the budget will reduce the duty on foreign liquor. Should that happen, he plans to launch Piper’s Clan whiskey in the country.
Meanwhile, his father gropes for a presence in the vacuum cleaners and water purifiers market with his Modi Hoover brand with help from eldest daughter Shalini, 34, an MBA from the University of Pittsburg and married to K K Birla’s grandson from his eldest daughter Nandini Nopany. His once- the famous airline, ModiLuft, is now defunct. “My father asked me if I wanted to start on my own. I said yes. I want to look at sunrise industries where there’s hope. And it isn’t manufacturing,” says Karan who wants to spend at least the next couple of years here before deciding whether to stick it out or seek greener pastures abroad. “I want to start in a small way and start slowly. And then, learn from my mistakes,” he says.
Also starting small, is cousin Himani, 28, UK’s daughter. A stats grad from Delhi’s Venkateshwara College, Himani first set up an aluminium tubes plant in ’98 for her father’s medicine business, Win Medicare, before going on to sell tubes worth Rs 4.5 crore to pharma companies every year.
Then, two years ago, she tied up an equal-stakes venture with Germany’s Merz and Krell for writing instruments. Modi Senator pens sell in the Rs 500-Rs 15,000 range, mostly through institutional arrangements. In the first year, Himani sold pens worth Rs 3.5 crore and is looking at an Rs 8-crore turnover this year, selling to Novartis, Eli Lilly, Ranbaxy and Toyota among others. Soon she plans to foray into high-end retail through 50 premium stores. “It’s a distribution and marketing set-up,” she says.
Himani’s elder sister, Meghna, 29, has set her ambitions higher. After joining her father’s cosmetics joint venture in 1998, she helped turn around Revlon’s business in India, aligning the company’s marketing, sales, operations and finance into a composite whole and launching new products and colours at prices the market could afford. Meghna graduated with honours in economics from Delhi’s LSR before winging it to London Business School for a master’s in finance. Now she’s taken a two-year break for a management degree at Harvard. When she flies back home this May, Meghna plans to pick up the Revlon business from where she left off. “After turning around Revlon and putting a great management team in place, I needed a break. When I get back, I plan to bring in alternate leadership styles to my place of work,” she says.
“We are moving from asset-based businesses into businesses that have no assets. A majority of our present assets are intellectual property-based,” says Lalit, 39, the Rai Bahadur’s eldest grandson.
This strategy has worked quite remarkably for Samir, 33, whose father KK is the only Modi to have had an uninterrupted good run with Godfrey Phillips, in partnership with Phillip Morris of the US.
Starting in business just about the time of the split, Samir, a graduate from Delhi’s Hindu College, spent his initial years' training, first, at Godfrey Phillips’ Ghaziabad plant and then at Phillip Morris’ US operations. Samir says he was motivated when he returned at the end of ’93 but faced new challenges at home. His father didn’t want him in tobacco, so he gifted Samir two smaller companies, a texturising yarn ancillary of Modipon, and Modern Home Care, once owned by Johnson & Johnson: “My father said, ‘it’s good you are back. You have worked to be a manager, now start training to be an entrepreneur.”
Disappointment notwithstanding, Samir knew what to do. He sold off the texturising plant to Asia Polytex. But he worked hard on Modern Home Care taking its turnover up from Rs 70 lakh to Rs 7.5 crore, before selling it off to Henkel Spic for Rs 5 crore some five years ago.
And with the money he got and some generous help from his father, Samir launched himself in network marketing, investing Rs 10 crore in the first year of business. Today, Modi Care is a Rs 250 crore company, marketing products as diverse as shampoos, cosmetics and personal care items and tea, bleach, starch, water purifiers, storage containers and children’s books to middle-class homes across metros and small towns through the direct selling route.
“In our first year, we did business worth Rs 2.5 crore, in the sixth year almost Rs 170 crore. And this year we are looking at anywhere between Rs 250 crore and Rs 270 crore. Our target is Rs 1,000 crore in the next three years by when we should overtake Amway (India’s biggest direct selling company),” says Samir. What’s more, Modi Care is completely debt-free, sustaining its growth through internal accruals, and is set to post a 10% profit this year. How did he make this happen? Samir says he first tapped into the R&D facility of the erstwhile Modern Home Care to launch 10 products. Today his 160- the product range is sourced from 9 research labs out of the US, Greece, Malaysia, Australia and Japan, besides India, with Modi Care investing 10% of its turnover every year to develop new products. He’s also invested in his people, picking up CEO Nripendra Brar from Johnson & Johnson. “I have the ex-corporate affairs and finance man of Amway Corporation as my CFO. I have the IT head of Kashmir as my IT head. I have two people from Pepsi running my operations and sourcing, I have the corporate communications person from British Council as my corporate affairs person.
And now we have hired some managers from Hughes.” He has also been generous with his staff, giving them wages higher than the industry average. Now and then, Samir’s also been hiring professional help from abroad as with a Japanese consultant to help with research, an ex-president of the Clinic International to help launch cosmetics, a professional from Hong Kong to train his sales force and an ex-CEO of Amway Japan to help with networking. In In the past, he also hired Boston Consultancy Group and Andersen Consulting to help give shape to his business which has grown from one office floor to five- and-a-half floors now, adding 20,000 new distributors a month to its list of 780,000 countrywide.
Samir says some 40% of his distributors are active, placing orders at least once every quarter. The dropout rate is just about 10%. His top consultant earned Rs 60 lakh last year and is well on his way to doubling his income this year. Samir himself draws no salary from Modi Care but depends on family income. Samir is a dreamer, dreaming of joining the Fortune 500 league by the time he retires at 50. And to do that, he’s selling dreams to the common man.
Other third-gen Modis are dreamers too. Dreaming of striking it big someday. Some on their own, and some under their fathers’ shadows. Take Prashant Modi, for instance. This 28-year-old finance graduate from Boston University joined father YK’s business in ’95. And now he’s busy tapping gas over a 210 sq km spread in West Bengal’s Raniganj coalfields. “When I joined, my father was primarily in bulk tea with Rossell Industries, and then with paging and the call centre business of Modi Telecom. Then we got the coal bed methane block. From ’94 to ’97 we did extensive studies and analyses in some preliminary wells to determine whether the investment was viable. And from the result we got, they were promising. So we decided to venture further and go into production.”
Last year, Great Eastern Energy Corporation, where Prashant is a director, signed the petroleum exploration licence agreement and started work initially on three wells. So far, YKM Holdings, which manages the family’s funds, has invested Rs 25 crore in the venture with 20% funding by an American partner. But by the time the project runs its course over the next seven years, investments would add up to almost Rs 600 crore, coming through a mix of debt, equity and internal accruals.
Prashant expects production to commence within the next year. “We are now into production drilling. The total programme is 163 wells.” And once those get going, he will sink money into developing gathering and compressing stations to sell gas to potential customers like cement and power plants.
Prashant says the gas project has been his major thrust for the past couple of years, but he also spends time looking after the telecom business where his father initially partnered with Korea Telecom to launch paging and domestic call centre services in India.
Modi Telecom now operates eight call centres of its own across the country, partnering with another company that runs nine centres, offering simple customer services to complex processes for FMCG companies and banks. And, he says, while the paging business is stagnant, Modi Telecom, where his family controls 65% equity, and has not been losing money. “As of today, we are a debt-free company and have prepaid our loans. And if somebody comes with the right price for our investment, we are open to selling out,” he says.
Meanwhile, Prashant’s eldest sister Anupama publishes an industrial products magazine and runs an internet website hosting trade fairs, while his other elder sister Prarthana looks after customer care and HR in the telecom venture. Prashant says his father taught him how to be analytical on the finance side and negotiate deals instead of sitting and haggling during his early days in business. But soon he brought new systems he learnt abroad on managing human resources. “There was no concept of cost to the company. You hired a person and gave him this allowance and that. I came in and said, ‘We will define everything, irrespective of what it is.’” Prashant’s cousin, Kapil, 25, has ventured out on his own. Making money out of his passion for horses to be able to sustain that passion. “All through my childhood, I was obsessed with horses. And I pursued my obsession. I am the first student of double Olympic champion Elena Petushkova of Russia. She trained me for free,” says Kapil, son of D K Modi who recently inducted younger son Manav, 22, a finance grad from the London School of Economics, as a trainee in his distillery business. Kapil says while in Russia, he first started a technology venture with the cash he earned from winning horse riding championships in Europe. “I started about five or six years ago, dealing in notebook computers and hardware, which never really took off.” Next, he launched a software company in Russia, which he sold off to a friend. Then a year ago, he launched Inlightcem, a 120- seat call centre in Jaipur, with a 25% stake of his own and without financialsupport from his family. His partners are an American cross-culturalcommunications and management expert and an Australian real estate professional who’s also into customer service and outsourcing professionals.
“Sport is a common link between us. I have met and interacted with Fortune 500 companies worldwide in the last few years. In Europe, anybody of consequence is seen at equestrian championships,” says Kapil. The entire management team at Inlightcem, comprising 15 professionals, have been executives in Fortune 100 companies. They now cater to one of the largest European IT corporations and provide customer service, technical support and customisation services to two Fortune 500 firms among others. Kapil plans to set up a second call centre either in Bangalore or Pune soon.
Kapil says he’s more of a mentor to his employees, taking home Rs 1 lakh in post-tax wages every month, but he won’t reveal how much his call centre earns. Right through his childhood, his ambition has been to create wealth to do three things, he says. One, fund his equestrian sport, which is very expensive. Two, support animal welfare; and three, people welfare. For now, he’s ploughed his profits from business into raising show horses at his stable in Noida and training himself to represent India in equestrian sport at the Athens Olympics next year.
Also making his fortune out of IT is Manish, 34, son of MK who runs Modipon, once a huge player in nylon filament yarns, now stripped of much of its sparkle. A computer grad from Bangalore University, Manish went to Columbia Business School graduated near the top of his class. When he returned to Delhi in mid-94, Manish first joined his father and helped upgrade Modipon’s IT infrastructure. But the call of entrepreneurship saw him launch an internet business solutions firm NetAcross in September ’96, with $1 million as seed money from the family.
“When it came to making a career decision, it was very obvious to me that starting my own business would be the only option that would provide me with the professional satisfaction I seek,” says Manish. By October ’99, he had arranged another $2 million in funding from eVentures and then another $2 million before merging his company with Singapore-based Intiqua, one of Asia’s largest e-services firms, in April 2001. At the time of the merger, NetAcross had revenues of $8 million and was on the verge of breaking even; the family’s seed money had grown four-fold. The the company was merged with Intiqua for a part-cash-part-equity consideration, and Manish is now Intiqua’s co-chairman, overseeing its international operations from his pad in New York, where he relocated in mid-2002. Manish says his ambition is to constantly innovate and create. And he confesses to setting up NetAcross with the intention of quitting once the business stabilised. This took him four years to achieve. And now that he’s in the Big Apple, he’s setting up an offshore outsourcing consultancy, Exevo, with part family funding and partly with the cash from selling NetAcross.
“I came to the US as it’s the best place to start a technology company to service global clients,” says Manish. But he plans to return to India once he successfully exits this venture in the next two to five years. When that happens, Manish will probably start another business. That will also be the time to review his potential role as an inheritor. That’s one thing Manish’s cousin, Abhishek, 27, son of the UK, has already done well. Way back in 1932, when Gujar Mal Modi set up the foundation of his empire, he started with a sugar mill. Some 65 years later, Abhishek joined that mill after graduating in chemical engineering from Manipal. “When I joined the mill in 98, the sugar industry was already in a very mature stage of development. Prices had been constant for the last many years.” So, Abhishek stepped in to help build his commodity business into a brand. “My the company hopes to revolutionise the way sugar is distributed and perceived by the end consumer.” Abhishek, who’s joined elder sister Meghna at Harvard, plans to do exactly that when he returns this May to take charge at Modi Sugar.
At the other end of the family divide, 37-year-old Alok is also playing his role as inheritor to the hilt. After graduating from Manipal in industrial and production engineering, he joined the family business in the wake of the split. That was about the time his father, VK, signed an agreement with the Guardian of the US to bring float glass to India. Today, Alok as the joint managing director of Gujarat Guardian runs his Rs 500-crore business as a mature businessman. “I was lucky to be able to get into the project. In ’92, I went to Guardian’s US facility for some 6-8 months to understand what making glass was all about. My father was the chairman, but he left the day-to-day work to the team that we created between the American managing director and myself.” Yet, his start wasn’t easy for Alok. “We were a highly loss-making company in the first three years. Today we are very profitable and a market leader with a 30% share, competing with the likes of Asahi Float Glass and Saint Gobain.” Gujarat Guardian incurred initial losses because of its huge Rs 500 crore investment. Guardian is a 50% partner and the Modis and the Gujarat government hold the rest. Also, as Indians were unfamiliar with float glass, they had to first educate the market and create a network and distribution system. “We set up the company in a closed economy. There was the exchange risk administration scheme and we were paying 26% interest on our foreign exchange loans. The risk of devaluation was with the banks. But since we didn’t benefit from that, we were forced to restructure,” says Alok.
That was also when Asahi stepped in, creating excess capacity. And that was a terrible start. Prices went down drastically. “We cut prices almost by 50% in one day because the sheet manufacturers took prices down. I played an active role in all this along with the managing director, making policies, building capacities, building relationships, visiting customers and checking them out.”
Today, having turned Gujarat Guardian around, Alok says he confines himself to the day-to-day running of his company. He’s also opted for a flat management, eliminating the designation of general managers and replacing them with departmental heads. And while his father, as chairman, takes an active interest in the business, their responsibilities are defined.
Alok also involves himself in his father’s industrial engines business, Modi Mirlees Blackstone started in ’89 but leaves its actual running to a professional. He briefly got busy selling engines between ’95 and ’98 to big industrial houses. On the margin, he also helped his wife Ritika set up a travel agency that recently signed up with global travel franchising major Uniglobe to launch Modi Uniglobe South Asia.
But between the glass and engines ventures, Alok’s also had his run-in with rough weather when a move to induct him as CEO of Modi Rubber had to be aborted in 2001 because of differences between his father and uncle. However, Alok’s most exciting venture yet has been in the hospitality sector, with his father setting up a chain of fast food joints. “The idea actually came from my sister Archana. In ’97 she got involved with my father in the restaurant business. However, due to certain reasons she could not move forward and since the business was there, I got involved.” Alok says he doesn’t mind if a particular business is small just because of its size.
When they tied up with Pizza Pizza Express, for an India launch, first as a franchisee, it was only present in England. Since then, its British promoters have picked up a 50% stake in the Indian venture that boasts a restaurant each in Pune and Mumbai and two in Delhi. Soon they plan to expand to Gurgaon and Bangalore, with one more restaurant in Mumbai. Alok says he’s not embarrassed flaunting his inheritance. “Do I look at myself as an inheritor? Absolutely. How else could I be running a Rs 500 crore company? I inherited it. I didn’t create it myself. Maybe, if I was not there, the company would not be as successful as it is today,” he says.
On the other hand, Lalit, 39, presides over a fledgling media and entertainment conglomerate that is his own creation. Lalit first joined the business in ’87, way before the family split, training with Phillip Morris in Hong Kong and later under his father KK, at Modipon. Then just about the time he was planning a 25,000-tonne polyester filament plant, Walt Disney approached him for an Indian JV in 1990, Disney’s first JV ever. The offer got Lalit interested and he worked for three years to get the government’s nod, finally launching Walt Disney India in ’93. Disney and Lalit invested Rs 1 crore as initial equity in a 51:49 partnership. And Disney licensed its products to the Indian venture that grossed Rs 15 crore in profits in the first year, employing just one person. “We found that there was no other model like Disney in the world. You make Mickey Mouse and recycle that again and again. And a new generation comes up every four-five years when it goes out to the market again and the cycle changes. You take one icon and recycle it,” says Lalit. To recycle Mickey Mouse, Lalit took to television, grabbing key time slots on DD on Sunday mornings, developing a new market for children. And the advertisers queued up. The success with television prompted Lalit to foray into the distribution of Disney movies to cinema theatres as well. But the move failed. He had to deal with huge piracy and the distributors cheated on payments. Eventually, he gave up on that business after three years.
Along the way, he also aborted a DTH venture with Direct TV as the government kept him waiting too long before flashing the policy red light. A third venture with United Artists for multiplexes also came unstuck because of high entertainment taxes. And as recently as a year ago his plans to launch internet through cable failed as subscribers found the rentals too high. “Each of these experiments cost us Rs 8-10 crore,” says Lalit. He was able to sustain those expenses out of his running businesses and without recourse to family funds.
But his most successful venture yet has been in cable television. In the ’90s, several Indian channels were launched that delivered signals free-to-air across the country, sustaining advertisement revenue. And no one quite knew what pay TV was. That’s when Lalit launched his Modi Entertainment Network, bringing ESPN to Indian audiences.
“ESPN gave us a Rs 5-crore advance to set up the business. And we set up an entire infrastructure and network and built the whole business from scratch.” Today MEN distributes Ten Sports, Hallmark, DD National, DD Sports and FTV. It is also talking to independent broadcasters like Aaj Tak and NDTV to host their channels, even as it has fallen out with ESPN. MEN also plans to launch a new category channel on its own, besides a 24- hour sports news channel in JV with a foreign partner. MEN could also be launching its bouquet for third-party distribution in competition with Star, Zee and Sony. Lalit believes that distribution is going to be the key to the survival of all channels. And his distribution business is working just fine. “MEN is a very profitable business. At the end of the day, you have to keep in mind the fact that the cost of distributing one channel and distributing 10 is the same. Typically one channel should be able to pay your distribution costs.”
So, having consolidated his distribution business, Lalit is now focussing on content. Last year, he bought out FTV in India where it reaches 4.5 million homes and is now customising it for the local audience. And as a spin-off from that acquisition, he recently launched India’s first fashion café at the Bangalore Meridien, before launching similar hangouts in Delhi and Mumbai. “We intend to franchise the corporation across India.” The fashion joints will provide a cafe, a lounge, a bar and a club and will be capable of telecasting live in-cafe fashion shows.
Lalit plans to launch an entire fashion infrastructure comprising an event management set-up, a studio and a fashion mag to tap into the country’s latest fad for grease paint on a corporate basis. Lalit’s romance with entertainment should earn him close to Rs 300 crore this year. And he’s targeting Rs 500 crore a year later, out of Walt Disney and MEN. His gamble with entertainment has also taken him into the lottery, which could be his biggest gamble ever. It could also be the biggest gamble the Modis have made since the economy opened up 10 years ago, eating up close to Rs 350 crore in investments in the next few months. Lalit’s foray into gambling is through the online lottery route that has recently been opened up to private investments. Wick Chandler, now renamed MWC bagged the first licence for online lotteries. After some initial hiccups Lalit’s set to launch the Manipur state online lottery soon.
“It’s our biggest venture and we have already looked into the investment side fully and we are going forward to put the project in place,” says Lalit. For now, MWC is 100% owned by Lalit. But he’s also signed a 50:50 JV with an overseas partner to put the infrastructure in place. And Lalit plans to use that infrastructure not only to sell lottery tickets but for countrywide third-party electronic distribution as well. Through 20,000 outlets. These electronic retail points will take orders for consumer products, facilitate third-party bill payments, and transact foreign exchange and money transfers. He’s also in talks with four banks to manage their ATM operations. Lalit has been working in the lottery business for three years now, having already sunk Rs 65 crore in the venture that has the potential to generate anywhere between Rs 2,000 crore and Rs 5,000 crore turnover a year. Yet, Lalit, like cousin Alok, says “At the end of the day, turnover is no criterion anymore. It’s the profitability you can generate and the ideas you can put in place.”
If ideas were all that counted, Dilip, 28, should have been lucky. So far, luck is yet to shine on him. When B K Modi’s son returned home from London, in his Karan Joharesque's demeanour, armed with a master’s degree in business administration from the Imperial College of Science and Technology, he set himself to restructuring his father’s business, dreaming, like his father, of making it big in India’s corporate firmament. “When I came back in 1995-96, I found Dr Modi was trying to build a vehicle that would enable him to achieve his vision of building on a strong foundation he had worked on over his professional career. And that was ModiCorp.” Soon Dilip plunged into drawing up a massive corporate blueprint with the help of global consultant McKinsey. “For me, it was a seamless transition, coming from a business school to working with a management consultant to try and identify a role and how we should structure what was happening on a go-forward basis,” he says.
Dilip ended up spending a lot of time looking at his father’s portfolio. At that point of time, between Modi Rubber and Modistone, the rubber and the tyre business, BK Modi also controlled the Xerox and IT (Olivetti) businesses and a telecom switching venture (Alcatel), and was now trying to consolidate his investments in various joint venture partnerships into a single entity ModiCorp of which he was 100% owner.
That was also the time when opportunity knocked in the form of a cellular venture and Dilip executed the launch of India’s first mobile operator in Calcutta, MobileNet on 31 July, ’95 in partnership with Telstra of Australia. He followed that up with two more cellular launches in Punjab and Karnataka, partnering with Distacom and Motorola. “I tried to look at the future horizon and, therefore, my focus was mainly on how to build the telecom business and unlock value in some of the other businesses, mainly intellectual and financial capital.” He started by convincing his father to sell his stake in Alcatel, where he saw a conflict of interest because Alcatel was making telecom switches and he had to independently negotiate with switch manufacturers to source a competitive package for his cellular venture.
Eventually, though the Calcutta initiative took off, Dilip says he didn’t find it lucrative. So he sold it off to Airtel, concentrating on Punjab and Karnataka, where the Spice brand was a success.
Today, Spice is the third biggest operator outside Delhi/Mumbai, with a subscriber base of close to 6 lacks. “We are a profitable organisation working on benchmark EBIDTA margins in the region of 40-45%. Last year, the industry would have grown in the region by 70%. In the case of Punjab, we grew at 100% and in Karnataka by about 80%,” says Dilip. However, this good run may not last long. Spice Telecom has been fighting a legal battle with vendors over unpaid dues and now, with Reliance rolling out its countrywide telecom juggernaut, Spice could be left without much space.
Of course, Dilip claims he didn’t see the dispute with vendors coming this fast. “When we started the telecom project, we took equipment from vendors on credit, which was short-term. The idea was that we would roll out fast and as we got in the subscribers we would get the package refinanced with longer-term debt.” But that didn’t happen. “When we went back to the market to get refinance we got caught in policy issues. That was also the time when many banks that had financed earlier projects were facing problems. The delay in being able to get that loan refinanced was the issue and not the shortage of funds. We’ve been trying to work on this with our vendors.” This is one reason that, while he hasn’t yet called it quits, Dilip admits he’s been constantly evaluating strategic options of selling out to a national brand. But he says he’ll address those choices only when it’s time to take a call.
Meanwhile, ModiCorp too has changed. Early last year, B K Modi decided to call it a day and spend most of his time with the VHP where he’s a top office bearer. “Dr Modi retired in January and my mother stepped in as chairman. And the board offered me the position of CEO. At that point my objective was to look at the current portfolio of ModiCorp and try and understand how we take it forward,” says Dilip.
Soon he decided to unlock the value of the Spice brand. And ModiCorp was re-christened SpiceCorp. “Spice brings with it the various elements of fun. SPICE also has the ICE component in it. That’s what we are trying to focus on. On information, communication and entertainment. We want to see Spice as a lifestyle brand,” says Dilip.
There’s yet another Modi who’s effected a smart turnaround in her very own lifestyle. When Gujar Mal’s eldest granddaughter Charu Modi Bharatiya, 40, got married to the late Ajay Bharatiya nearly 23 years ago, she was only leading the path for her younger cousins -- Aparna Goenka 36 (d/o MK), Archana Singhania, 35 (d/o VK), Shalini Nopany 34 (d/o SK), Malvika Poddar, 30 (d/o SK) and Ritikia Rungta, 29 (d/o BK) -- to settle into motherhood and domesticity in some of India’s biggest business dynasties. For Charu, however, a short-lived marriage forced her back to school even as a mother of two. Looking for a choice, she left for the US at 33, for an MBA in international management at Thunderbird. Then, last November, Charu launched Modi Apollo International Institute in Delhi, bringing the Western International University campus to India in partnership with Apollo, America’s largest educational corporation. In its first year, MAII is targeting 500 students in advanced management courses. It will ramp up its capacity to 1,500 students in the next three years.
After completing her MBA, Charu worked for Kaiser Permanente, in the managed healthcare business before switching to Estee Lauder. While there, she came across huge manpower shortages in critical areas of business. That’s when she thought of bringing advanced education to India to create a massive resource base of people employable anywhere in the world. So, after returning home two years ago, Charu approached her father for help. KK Modi agreed, but threw her a challenge: if she was serious about business, he asked her to locate a billion-dollar partner first. And Charu found Apollo. “Becoming an entrepreneur is in my blood,” Charu told ET. And there isn’t a third-gen Modi yet who doesn’t believe as much.
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