WWW.ECONOMICTIME S .

COM

7
Indias strength has always been the quality of its entrepreneurs, whether its individuals or corporations
Anshu Jain
Co-CEO, Deutsche Bank

AM Naik

THE AWARD SEEKS TO honour the contribution to public good through commitment to critical social causes that influence the lives of thousands of needy Indians

Corporate Citizen of the Year Larsen & Toubro

INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL: (from left) ICICI Bank Chairman KV Kamath, HDFC Bank MD Aditya Puri, TAFE Chairman & CEO Mallika Srinivasan and Unilever COO Harish Manwani

The Big Giant of Engineering has a Humane Heart

Business Reformer P Chidambaram Union Minister of Finance

This Man of the Moment Always Means Business

n October 29 last year, three months after taking over as the finance minister for the first time in UPA2, P Chidambaram said he would keep the fiscal deficit for 2012-13 at 5.3% of GDP. The markets laughed off his assertion. Most private forecasters pegged the deficit at close to 6% of GDP citing a slowing economy. Economic growth fell to a decade-low of 5% for the year, proving many of them right, but they did not have the same satisfaction with their estimates for the fiscal deficit. An unprecedented spending freeze saw the fiscal deficit drop to 4.9% of GDP, letting Chidambaram have the last laugh. For the current year, he has set a target of 4.8%, which he insists will not be breached. Chidambaram has restored the credibility of the government in the economic sphere, possibly his biggest achievement in his latest stint at North Block. The markets listen and, more importantly, believe what the government says. Although at times they are disappointed by the quantum of action, there is no doubting the seriousness of intent any more. K now n to relish cha l lenges,

Chidambaram, a Harvard-trained lawyer acknowledged by friends and foes alike for his clarity and rigour, has transformed North Block, the seat of Indias economic policy making, almost overnight. The 68-yearold, immortalised in public memory for his dream budget of 1997-98, has almost taken it personally to change Indias economic destiny. Soon after taking charge, he goaded the His actions UPA leadership to helped take tough decisions. India avert So much so, that UPA a sovereign almost staked its surratings vival on a decision downgrade championed by him that appeared FDI in multi-brand retail. Rules for singlebrand retail were eased, the aviation sector was opened to foreign airlines and the government bit the bullet on fuel price reform. Chidambaram suggested FDI reforms and a more liberal regime for foreign investors, an idea that officials in his ministry rushed from conception to announcement in record time. He rushed from one global financial centre to another to assure jittery investors that all was well with India,

and outlined a series of reforms that he subsequently delivered. The implementation of the controversial anti-tax avoidance rules (GAAR), was deferred for three years and the minister promised a non-adversarial tax regime to soothe nerves frayed by the retrospective amendments to the tax law in the 2012-13 budget. Another game-changing idea was to suggest and get the government to set up the Cabinet Committee on Investment to clear stalled projects, the results of which should begin to show up in the next few quarters. But through all this, he has also been less than lucky. The recent rupee depreciation has taken some of the sheen off the turnaround achieved by the finance minister. Growth may be lower than last year and inflation continues to rise. But to his credit, Chidambaram continues to fight on and argue for more reforms. He has promised to rein in the current account deficit and has assured that election-year populism will not derail his budget and reforms to repair the economy will continue. The wider jury may be out on whether this can happen, but the ET Awards Jury has little doubt about his intent.

THE AWARD SEEKS TO honour a public servant (politician or bureaucrat) dedicated to the cause of promoting business & trade

hen you are a company with plants and large campuses at as many as 24 locations across the country, it sometimes becomes a matter of conscience for you to take care of the people who live and work just outside your factory walls. At Larsen & Toubro, this is not an option, it is embedded in the very culture of the company. When you become an integral part of a neighbourhood, it becomes your obligation to become one with the community around, says Executive Chairman AM Naik. You have to think, on compassionate grounds, what more you can do for the people [living around your area of operations]. The more people in your neighbourhood are happy, the more there is peace in the area. Not to mention considerable goodwill for the company. In 2012-13, L&T contributed `73.04 crore (or about 1.49% of its profit after tax) towards social development, which took the form of four focus areas: education, skill-building, healthcare and environment. According to its 2013 annual report, the company has reached out to half-a-million beneficiaries, secured a source of livelihood for over 5,000 underprivileged women and set up more than 50 learning centres. When it comes to education, the company has through outreach to 147 schools and its community learning centres benefitted almost 1 lakh underprivileged children (a 44% increase over last year). The engineering and technology company has helped develop infrastructure in schools near its Hazira, Kansbahal and Chandigarh plants, and in the suburbs of Hyderabad, Jamshedpur, Chennai, Surat,

Rourkela, Murshidabad and Vizag. It provides learning kits to various rural and slum schools, as well to orphanages. The companys CSR driver, the L&T Public Charitable Trust, has supported the implementation of Project Vidyaa in Gujarat and Maharashtra, where some 36,000 children in 56 schools participated in various academic events, health check-ups and IQ and personality development sessions. The idea that by 2022, of an estimated 700 million jobseekers in India only 200 million may be graduates, is not lost on L&T. The construction major turns a keen eye on skill-building by supporting eight construction skills training institutes (CSTIs) and 27 Industrial Training Institutes across the country. It also believes in a domino effect when L&T now it comes to women plans to up that empowering the ante on them with employeducation & ment and vocational nutrition for opportunities will go children, and a long way in creating healthcare a healthy, well-adjustfor women ed society, while also bridging the skills gap. L&T has collaborated with various non-profit organisations to ensure income generation for 5,200 women till now. L&Ts Project Neev works with non-profits to mainstream and create livelihood opportunities for the differently abled. In the coming years, it will up the ante on education and nutrition initiatives for children; skill-building and income generation; healthcare for women and kids and general medical care. It will also pursue specific green goals in ensuring environmental sustainability.

Startup of the Year BookMyShow

METHODOLOGY

He Proves All Weekdays, Not Just Fridays, are Blockbusters

he year 2013 has proved to be a watershed for Ashish Hemrajani, 38, and his team at BookMyShow. In July this year, Indias most popular ticketing website signed a five-year pact with PVR Cinemas to sell the multiplex chains tickets on its portal. This one deal is estimated to yield revenues of `1,000 crore for the company, which has been chosen as the Startup of the Year 2013. We feel very privileged, said Hemrajani, founder and CEO of Bigtree Entertainment, the holding company of BookMyShow. This award had a heavyweight jury, and if they think we are worthy, it is a big validation for us. Earlier this year, Bigtree acquired Ticketgreen.com, a rival with a large footprint in southern India, cementing BookMyShows near-monopolistic stature as Indias largest entertainment ticketing portal. A venture that initially started out as just another movie ticket portal, BookMyShow now offers the Indian consumer a choice of tickets ranging from the Indian Premier League to the Formula One India Grand Prix, music concerts, plays and stand-up comic acts. BookMyShow has expanded operations to global markets, including New Zealand, Australia

HOW THEY MADE IT TO THE HALL OF FAME

ET adopted a democratic, participative and rigorous process to choose the best and the brightest of India Inc. In an elaborate two-step exercise, the selection process began with number crunching done by the ET Intelligence Group (ETIG). In some categories, parameters were set by ETIG to shortlist the candidates. For example, for the Company of the Year award, companies with an average market capitalisation of over `11,000 crore and revenues of over `3,000 crore were considered. They were ranked on the parameters of net sales, net profit, market cap and RoE, share price return over a one-year period and CAGR in revenue and net profit over a three-year period. Companies incorporated post 1995 and having a market capitalisation of more than `1,000 crore, were considered for the Emerging Company of the Year award. Criteria used for Business Leader and Entrepreneur of the Year included the creation of successful and enduring brands, leadership and vision, and a transformational approach to business and industry that has left a lasting mark. The new category of Startup of the Year looks for an enterprise with potential to establish itself as an innovative and financially successful company. For Global Indian, the jury looked for an Indian who has excelled against competition in a global environment, and for the Corporate Citizen Award, companies with turnover exceeding `500 crore that have done well or have made significant progress on social, environmental and governance challenges were considered. The Business Reformer category seeks to honour a public servant or politician dedicated to the cause of promoting business and trade, while Lifetime Achievement honours a personality who has transformed the face of their industry, and put India on the international map in their own way.

Ashish Hemrajani

THE AWARD SEEKS TO recognise a startup which has the potential to rapidly establish itself as an innovative and financially successful company

and the UK, boosting investor interest in the five-year-old venture. In August 2012, Accel Partners, which counts companies such as Facebook in its portfolio, invested `100 crore in the company to buy an undisclosed stake through a combination of primary share issue and sale of shares by Network18, one of the investors. The deal reportedly valued the Mumbai-based BookMyShow at close to `400 crore. For Hemrajani, the Hemrajani startup journey began says 90% of while he was on vacamovie tickets tion nearly a decade bought ago. Intrigued by the online in variety of leisureIndia are time options that the purchased Internet threw up on his portal while holidaying in Sout h A f ric a, t he 24-year-old trawled the sites of international ticketing companies such as Fandango and Ticketmaster. Back home in India, Hemrajani quit his job at ad firm J Walter Thompson to launch Bigtree Entertainment. But he could not sustain the fledgling venture after the dotcom bubble burst in 2001. He managed to stay afloat by running call centres and developing software for cinemas. He relaunched the brand as BookMyShow.com in 2007, when he saw a revival in the

consumer market. It was the second coming, said the entrepreneur, who expects to sell 100 million tickets a year by 2016-17. He estimates that around 4 billion movie tickets are sold in India every year, and that 90% of the tickets bought online are purchased on his portal. BookMyShow offers tickets for over 2,000 screens in tie-up with cinema chains such as Inox, Fame and Big Cinemas, and theatre venues such as Prithvi, India Habitat Centre and Rangashankara. Hemrajani said the company earns 40% of its revenues from non-movie events, including Formula 1, Indian Premier League and football and live music concerts. The focus now for BookMyShow is Indias much-neglected tier-2 and tier3 cities. Given the low Internet penetration in the country, the company will not simply stop at offering tickets online. The risk capital funding is being used to sign on single-screen cinemas and events in small towns and cities, and building technologies around mobile payments and applications. Mobile is a huge thrust, said Hemrajani, who expects one-third of revenues through mobile transactions in the near future. A competitive sailor, Hemrajani said the best thing about this award was that it was not in anybodys hands.