Gurubhai Moves !

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Vishal Retail’s fall taught Ram Chandra Agarwal some tough lessons !

The polish on the ornate table is chipped, and the upholstery on the chair looks a little ragged.

Ram Chandra Agarwal, Chairman and Managing Director of V2 Retail Ltd, enters the office. Two employees follow him in, carrying jacket samples. Agarwal looks at the jackets, chooses two and asks the men to place orders. The jackets will be sold at his new chain of V2 stores.

“Our selling proposition is good quality at affordable prices,” says Agarwal. “The jackets that I just rejected were inexpensive, but the quality was poor.”

Agarwal knows his business better than he did a year ago. The worn office furniture is a constant reminder that he is a survivor. An unsuccessful attempt to expand his business cost him what he had built over 24 years.

Ram Chandra Agarwal brings V2

In 2007, when his previous venture, called Vishal Retail Ltd, made an initial public offer, or IPO, it was valued at Rs 2,000 crore. The media breathlessly reported everything it did, from the IPO to opening outlets in different cities.

By 2008, Vishal Retail had 2,50,000 square feet of retail space and five factories, and Agarwal planned to open more stores. He took short-term loans, though he refuses to say how much. He thought that he would later infuse capital through equity to pay off these loans.

Few thought then that the company’s rapid growth would not stay permanent, and Agarwal did not foresee that the economy would nosedive in 2008. But when he wanted to dilute equity, he found that there were no buyers.

Soon, everything started to fall apart – sales fell, debts started piling up, and real estate maintenance became a financial burden. “Banks started pressuring us to bring in a new equity partner, and we finally sold Vishal,” says Agarwal. US-based private equity firm TPG Capital and the Shriram Group bought it in 2011 for Rs 70 crore.

“I had become very ambitious then, but now I’m more cautious,” says Agarwal. When TPG bought Vishal, it had debts of Rs 750 crore, which the banks restructured after the buyout. In addition, Agarwal owed banks nearly Rs 50 crore, and close to Rs 10 crore to vendors. With the Rs 10 crore to Rs 12 crore of borrowed money that remained, he started his second innings. Like his earlier venture, V2 sells clothes at low prices.

What is different this time is that everything is calculated and modest. Agarwal is not making massive investments. The first store was in Mahipalpur, on the outskirts of Delhi.

“Real estate is cheaper here, and the store is doing pretty well,” he says. Agarwal concurs with friends and former colleagues who say that one of the reasons his earlier venture failed was that it could not make a smooth transition from an entrepreneurial set-up to an organisational one.

“There is an optimum way in which a business can be run single-handedly,” says Lalit Agarwal, Founder of V-Mart, a retail chain. He worked with Ram Chandra Agarwal from 1999 to 2003, and parted ways because of differences over how the business should be run.

V2 Store in Faridabad, Haryana

But V2 Retail has a Chief Executive Officer, who oversees dayto-day operations – Dinesh Malpani, former CEO at Jubilant Retail. Agarwal is also putting information technology, systems and processes in place, which he sees as crucial to efficiency and transparency.

“First we should have management bandwidth, then we can go for expansion,” he says. He has also set up a purchase order committee, which vets the quality and prices of goods.

Manmohan Agarwal, who runs online retailer Yebhi.com and worked with Vishal Retail from 2007 to 2009. He says he believes V2 Retail’s Agarwal can make it big again.

“Vishal was India’s Walmart,” he says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he creates such a big company again.” V2 has 10 stores at present, and plans to open another five soon. It already has 1,00,000 square feet of retail space and is now planning to venture into cyberspace. Agarwal is preparing to launch an e-commerce platform to boost sales and awareness.

One of the biggest lessons of the Vishal Retail debacle was to avoid manufacturing. When the company was struggling with debt, the first things to be shut down in the business consolidation drive were the factories. But things will be done differently at V2, which currently buys merchandise. “We will outsource manufacturing and control quality,” says Agarwal.

Starting all over again has been difficult, he says in his trademark Hinglish. “It has taken a lot of willpower,” he adds. In business, he says, he is guided by the the Bhagavad Gita: “Stay detached emotionally, but work with passion.”

Timeline

‘We’ll do it right this time’

1. No enormous investments or debts in the beginning
2. The total investment so far is only Rs 15 crore
3. Slower expansion to keep debt in check
4. Increase management bandwidth before expansion 
5. High degree of automation to reduce leakages
6. Online presence and plan to start e-commerce soon

Source: Business Today

Author: Sunny Sen

Edition: Feb 5, 2012

Link: Here

Facebook on SOCIAL MISSION !

The world got a peek into Facebook‘s inner workings on Thursday when the Securities and Exchange Commission published the company’s preliminary prospectus for a long-awaited initial public offering (IPO). It also got a glimpse of how Mark Zuckerberg views the company.

In a letter to potential shareholders within the document, Zuckerberg wrote that Facebook “was built to accomplish a social mission” and said the company was inspired by technologies such as the printing press and television, which “make the world more open and connected.” He also stressed that “we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.”

Of course, this makes Facebook sound like it’s set out to deliver presents and free education to underprivileged children. Obviously, the goodwill note the letter strikes isn’t the whole picture — Facebook brought in $1 billion in profits last year. But it’s interesting to see how Zuckerberg, and what was likely a team of public relations professionals, define the company’s mission.

Full text of Zuckerberg’s letter:

Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.

We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter.

At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.

Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other.

Even if our mission sounds big, it starts small — with the relationship between two people.

Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.

People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.

By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.

We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.

We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy.

We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.

As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.
One result of making it easier to find better products is that businesses will be rewarded for building better products — ones that are personalized and designed around people. We have found that products that are “social by design” tend to be more engaging than their traditional counterparts, and we look forward to seeing more of the world’s products move in this direction.

Our developer platform has already enabled hundreds of thousands of businesses to build higher-quality and more social products. We have seen disruptive new approaches in industries like games, music and news, and we expect to see similar disruption in more industries by new approaches that are social by design.

In addition to building better products, a more open world will also encourage businesses to engage with their customers directly and authentically. More than four million businesses have Pages on Facebook that they use to have a dialogue with their customers. We expect this trend to grow as well.

We hope to change how people relate to their governments and social institutions.

We believe building tools to help people share can bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government that could lead to more direct empowerment of people, more accountability for officials and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time.

By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.

Through this process, we believe that leaders will emerge across all countries who are pro-internet and fight for the rights of their people, including the right to share what they want and the right to access all information that people want to share with them.

Finally, as more of the economy moves towards higher-quality products that are personalized, we also expect to see the emergence of new services that are social by design to address the large worldwide problems we face in job creation, education and health care. We look forward to doing what we can to help this progress.

Our Mission and Our Business

As I said above, Facebook was not originally founded to be a company. We’ve always cared primarily about our social mission, the services we’re building and the people who use them. This is a different approach for a public company to take, so I want to explain why I think it works.

I started off by writing the first version of Facebook myself because it was something I wanted to exist. Since then, most of the ideas and code that have gone into Facebook have come from the great people we’ve attracted to our team.

Most great people care primarily about building and being a part of great things, but they also want to make money. Through the process of building a team — and also building a developer community, advertising market and investor base — I’ve developed a deep appreciation for how building a strong company with a strong economic engine and strong growth can be the best way to align many people to solve important problems.

Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.

And we think this is a good way to build something. These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits.

By focusing on our mission and building great services, we believe we will create the most value for our shareholders and partners over the long term — and this in turn will enable us to keep attracting the best people and building more great services. We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money, but we understand that the best way to achieve our mission is to build a strong and valuable company.

This is how we think about our IPO as well. We’re going public for our employees and our investors. We made a commitment to them when we gave them equity that we’d work hard to make it worth a lot and make it liquid, and this IPO is fulfilling our commitment. As we become a public company, we’re making a similar commitment to our new investors and we will work just as hard to fulfill it.

The Hacker Way

As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler.

To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers — even managers whose primary job will not be to write code — to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp.

The examples above all relate to engineering, but we have distilled these principles into five core values for how we run Facebook:

Focus on Impact

If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems. It sounds simple, but we think most companies do this poorly and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on.

Move Fast

Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: “Move fast and break things.” The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.

Be Bold

Building great things means taking risks. This can be scary and prevents most companies from doing the bold things they should. However, in a world that’s changing so quickly, you’re guaranteed to fail if you don’t take any risks. We have another saying: “The riskiest thing is to take no risks.” We encourage everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means being wrong some of the time.

Be Open

We believe that a more open world is a better world because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact. That goes for running our company as well. We work hard to make sure everyone at Facebook has access to as much information as possible about every part of the company so they can make the best decisions and have the greatest impact.

Build Social Value

Once again, Facebook exists to make the world more open and connected, and not just to build a company. We expect everyone at Facebook to focus every day on how to build real value for the world in everything they do.

Thanks for taking the time to read this letter. We believe that we have an opportunity to have an important impact on the world and build a lasting company in the process. I look forward to building something great together.

$5 billion IPO for FACEBOOK !

Facebook’s $5 billion IPO is not the biggest of all time. Facebook’s $5 billion IPO is not a Groundhog Day-like replay of previous Internet Bubble fiascos. It is, in fact, the start of something big for the world’s most successful social brand and a sign that social networking is a real and grown-up business.

10 Facebook Investment “Risk Factors”

Competitors: Users increasingly engage with competing products.

Product Failure: Fail to introduce new and improved products or if they introduce new products or services that are not favorably received.

Ad Overload: They are unable to successfully balance their efforts to provide a compelling user experience with the decisions they make with respect to the frequency, prominence, and size of ads and other commercial content that they display.

Privacy Concerns: There are changes in user sentiment about the quality or usefulness of their products or concerns related to privacy and sharing, safety, security, or other factors.

Government Regulations: There are adverse changes in their products that are mandated by legislation, regulatory authorities, or litigation, including settlements or consent decrees.

Lack of Paid Advertising: Decisions by advertisers to use their free products, such as Facebook Pages, instead of advertising on Facebook. Loss of advertising market share to competitors.

Lack of User Interest: They fail to introduce new and improved products or if we introduce new products or services that are not favorably received. There are changes in user sentiment about the quality or usefulness of their products or concerns related to privacy and sharing, safety, security, or other factors

Poor Content Prioritization: They are unable to manage and prioritize information to ensure users are presented with content that is interesting, useful, and relevant to them.

Negative Press: Adverse media reports or other negative publicity involving Facebook, their Platform developers, or other companies in their industry.

Users Opt Out of Advertising: The degree to which users opt out of social ads or otherwise limit the potential audience of commercial content.

“Facebook is a great business and it will do well as a business, but it deserves a “fair value” of $50 – 60 billion, not $100 or $130 billion.” – Eric Jackson

Image Courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/niallkennedy/

Infographic design by Emily Caufield.

Reliance : Journey and beyond

Reliance Industries

The Reliance Group, founded by Dhirubhai H. Ambani (1932-2002) (Dhirajlal), is India’s largest private sector enterprise, with businesses in the energy and materials value chain. Group’s annual revenues are in excess of US$ 58 billion. The flagship company, Reliance Industries Limited, is a Fortune Global 500 company and is the largest private sector company in India.

Backward vertical integration has been the cornerstone of the evolution and growth of Reliance. Starting with textiles in the late seventies, Reliance pursued a strategy of backward vertical integration – in polyester, fibre intermediates, plastics, petrochemicals, petroleum refining and oil and gas exploration and production – to be fully integrated along the materials and energy value chain.

The Group’s activities span exploration and production of oil and gas, petroleum refining and marketing, petrochemicals (polyester, fibre intermediates, plastics and chemicals), textiles, retail, infotel and special economic zones.

Reliance enjoys global leadership in its businesses, being the largest polyester yarn and fibre producer in the world and among the top five to ten producers in the world in major petrochemical products.

Founder:

Dhirubhai Ambani

Dhirubhai H. Ambani founded Reliance as a textile company and led its evolution as a global leader in the materials and energy value chain businesses.

He is credited to have brought about the equity cult in India in the late seventies and is regarded as an icon for enterprise in India. He epitomized the spirit ‘dare to dream and learn to excel’.

The Reliance Group is a living testimony to his indomitable will, single-minded dedication and an unrelenting commitment to his goals.

“Between my past, the present and the future, there is one common factor: Relationship and Trust. This is the foundation of our growth.”

Starting as a small textile company, Reliance has in its journney crossed several milestones to become a Fortune 500 company in less than 3 decades.

Reliance Group: (Mukesh Ambani)

Reliance Industries Limited

Major Subsidiaries :

• Reliance Netherlands B.V.
• Reliance Retail Limited
• Reliance Jamnagar Infrastructure Limited
• Reliance Haryana SEZ Limited
• Reliance Industrial Investments and Holdings Limited
• Reliance Ventures Limited
• Reliance Strategic Investments Limited
• Reliance Exploration and Production DMCC
• Reliance Industries (Middle East) DMCC
• Reliance Commercial Associates Limited
• RIL (Australia) Pty Ltd
• Recron (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd
• Gulf African Petroleum Corporation (Mauritius)
• GAPCO Tanzania Limited
• GAPOil Tanzania Limited
• GAPCO Kenya Limited
• Transenergy Kenya Limited
• GAPCO Uganda Limited
• GAPCO Rwanda Sarl
• GAPOil (Zanzibar) Limited
• Reliance Fresh Limited
• Retail Concepts and Services (India) Limited
• Reliance Retail Insurance Broking Limited
• Reliance Dairy Foods Limited
• Reliance Retail Finance Limited
• RESQ Limited
• Reliancedigital Retail Limited
• Reliance Financial Distribution and Advisory Services Limited
• Reliance Hypermart Limited
• Reliance Retail Travel & Forex Services Limited
• Reliance Brands Limited
• Reliance Wellness Limited
• Reliance Footprint Limited
• Reliance Integrated Agri Solutions Limited
• Reliance Trends Limited
• Reliance Lifestyle Holdings Limited
• Reliance Universal Ventures Limited
• Reliance Autozone Limited
• Strategic Manpower Solutions Limited
• Reliance Gems and Jewels Limited
• Delight Proteins Limited
• Reliance F&B Services Limited
• Reliance Agri Products Distribution Limited
• Reliance Leisures Limited
• Reliance Retail Securities and Broking Company Limited
• Reliance Home Store Limited
• Reliance Trade Services Centre Limited
• Reliance Food Processing Solutions Limited
• Reliance Supply Chain Solutions Limited
• Reliance Loyalty and Analylitics Limited
• Reliance Digital Media Limited
• Reliance-GrandOptical Private Limited
• Reliance Vantage Retail Limited
• Reliance People Serve Limited
• Reliance Infrastructure Management Services Limited
• Reliance Petroinvestments Limited
• Reliance Universal Commercial Limited
• Reliance Global Commercial Limited
• Wave Land Developers Limited
• Reliance Global Business B.V.
• Reliance Global Energy Services Limited
• Reliance Gas Corporation Limited
• Reliance Global Energy Services (Singapore) Pte. Ltd
• Reliance Polymers (India) Limited
• Reliance Polyolefins Limited
• Reliance Aromatics & Petrochemicals Private Limited
• Reliance Energy and Project Development Private Limited
• Reliance Chemicals Limited
• Reliance Universal Enterprises Limited
• Reliance One Enterprises Limited
• Reliance Personal Electronics Limited
• International Oil Trading Limited
• Reliance Review Cinema Limited
• Reliance Replay Gaming Limited
• Reliance Nutritional Food Processors Limited
• Reliance Commercial Land & Infrastructure Limited
• Reliance Eminent Trading & Commercial Private Limited
• Reliance Progressive Traders Private Limited
• Reliance Prolific Traders Private Limited
• Reliance Universal Traders Private Limited
• Reliance Prolific Commercial Private Limited
• Reliance Comtrade Private Limited
• Reliance Ambit Trade Private Limited
• Reliance Corporate IT Park Limited
• Reliance Petro Marketing Limited
• LPG Infrastructure (India) Limited
• RIL USA Inc.
• Reliance Corporate Centre Limited
• Reliance Corporate Services Limited
• Reliance Convention and Exhibition Centre Limited
• Central Park Enterprises DMCC
• Reliance International B.V.
• Reliance Oil and Gas Mauritius Limited
• Reliance Exploration and Production Mauritius Limited
• Reliance Holding Cooperatief U. A.
• Reliance Holding Netherlands B. V.
• Reliance International Gas B. V.
• Reliance Exploration and Production B. V.
• Reliance Exploration and Production Limited
• Reliance Holding USA, Inc.
• Reliance Marcellus LLC
• Reliance Strategic (Mauritius) Limited
• Indiawin Sports Private Limited
• Reliance Eagleford Midstream LLC
• Reliance Ealgeford Upstream LLC
• Reliance Eagleford Upstream GP LLC
• Reliance Eagleford Upstream Holding LP
• Infotel Broadband Services Limited
• Mark Project Services Private Limited
• Reliance Energy Generation and Distribution Limited
• Reliance Marcellus II LLC
• Reliance Industries Investment and Holding Private Limited
• Reliance Security Solutions Limited
• Reliance Office Solutions Private Limited
• GenNext Innovation Ventures Private Limited
• Reliance Home Products Limited
• Reliance Style Fashion India Limited
• Reliance Styles India Limited
• Infotel Telecom Limited
• Rancore Technologies Private Limited
• Reliance Bio-fuel Holding BV

Major Associate :

• Reliance Industrial Infrastructure Limited

ADAG Reliance Group : (Anil Ambani)

Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group - Reliance

The Reliance Group is among India’s top three private sector business houses on all major financial parameters, with assets in excess of Rs.180,000 crore, and net worth to the tune of Rs.89,000 crore.

Across different companies, the group has a customer base of over 100 million, the largest in India, and a shareholder base of over 12 million, among the largest in the world.

Through its products and services, the Reliance Group touches the life of 1 in 10 Indians every single day. It has a business presence that extends to over 20000 towns and 4.5 lakhs villages in India, and 5 continents across the world.

The interests of the Group range from communications (Reliance Communications) and financial services (Reliance Capital Ltd), to generation, transmission and distribution of power (Reliance Energy), infrastructure and entertainment.

ADAG Reliance Group Companies:

• Reliance Communications
• Reliance Capital
• Reliance Infrastructure
• Reliance Power
• Reliance Entertainment
• Reliance Health
• Reliance BPO
• Mudra Communications Pvt. Ltd.
• NIS Sparta

Courtesy: www.ril.com & www.relianceadagroup.com