Since ’51, TAT-A Heads India Inc.

0

 

In the most revealing elucidating bare-for-the-first-time-fact from Union

Minister Arun Jaitley headed Corporate Affairs till now, TATA is incharge of India Inc Ministry, its out that since 1951 carrying on.  leaving other corporate entities — many of them are extinct today in Top 20 Business Houses list — far behind. This despite, many international entities have brushed aside many a corporate entity of the country that were in Top 20 in 1951 etc.

Today, they are dwindled or extinct or dwarfed or on-the-verge-of-extinction, so fierce is the “attack” on them from their “competitors”.

It’s not so at all with Tata. Rationalising this, without taking the name of Tata to avoid controversies of partisanism, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley says: “Take the list of 20 largest Business Groups in India pre-1991, and see how many of them have survived in the first 20. Prepare a list today in 2016 and You will see the difference.”

He could not be more right. Among the country’s current top 20 Business Houses — leaving out multi-nationals and institution-owned  companies such as L&T, ICICI and HDFC — only seven figured in a similar list for 1990. In comparision, the Top 20 Club o9f 1951 and 1990 had as many as 11 common names, while also covering a longer period than  the 25 years after economic reforms.

The extent of ‘churn’ is even more if we were to consider a large list comprising 50 Houses. In this case, there are just 15 of them today who were also present in 1990; Tata, Reliance, (Aditya) Birla, Essar, Mahindra, Bajaj, RP Goenka, Godrej, Murugappa, TVS, (Gautam) Thapar, Wadia, JK (Singhania), Apollo Tyres & MRF (Mappillai), in that order.

If 35 out of India’s 50 biggest conglomerate now weren’t part of this league 25 years ago, it amounts to a fair bit of churn at the top. The story becomes even starker when one looks at the many names that were small, if not non-existence, prior to 1991.

Those corporate entities which emanated from 1991 reforms and became big are: Vedanta, Bharti Airtel, Adani.  Mittal and Adani owe their meteoric rise to the country’s telecome and port sectors. Aggarwal made it big through acquiring State-owned Bharat Aluminium and

Hindustan Zinc. From virtually nowhere, today, they are among India’s Top 10 conglomerates albeit, behind Tata right on top of the list.

Other Biz Houses in Top 50 whose mammoth rise is linked with reforms of ’91 are linked with liberalization, privatization, globalization. They are mostly in business that were either thrown open to the private players (aviation, infrastructure, banking) ofr thrived because of export competitiveness resulting from rupee devaluation and integration into global value chains (IT/Software, Auto Ancillaries, Pharma, Textiles).

Grandhi Mallikarjuna Rao of GMR, Naresh Goyal of Jet Airways, Rahul Bhatia of InterGlobe Aviation (IndiGo), Uday Kotak of Kotak Mahindra Bank, Lagadapati family of the Lanco Infratech are today right on top leaving many established entities far behind again, far behind Tata. Next set of gainers are : Infosys, Sun Pharmaceuticals Industies, Samvardhana Motherson, Amtek, Alok Industries, Welspun and Aurobindo Pharma, Future Retail and Gitanjali Gems.

Besides them, there are those in Top 50 list who were known but were certainly not big enough to make it in Top 50. Today they are, thanks to “Brand New Economy” : Jindal, Jaypee, Wipro, Videocon, DLF, HCL, Hero, Max India, Amalgamations, Torrent, Hinduja, Rajan Raheja, Ajay Piramal, Dr Reddy’s Laboratories, Lupin, Cipla, UPI (Shroff), Asian Paints.

However, all said and detailed, it should be reiterated that the Tata tops them all. Behind Tata in that order are : Reliance, Aditya Birla, Vedanta/Agarwal, Airtel/Bharti, O.P. Jindal, Adani, Essar/Ruia, Mahindra, Jaypee/Gaur, Wipro, Inforsys,,Videocon/Dhoot, GMR, Sun Pharma, Bajaj, DLF, R.P. Goenka, HCL, Godrej.

Tata has been right on top since 1951…Sheer Perseverence, diligence, discipline, methodical, regularity, correct+required+timely stingy-ness, modesty, ban-brag…!

 

Leave A Reply