The Great Gambler ; in 10 Days, Chairman Venugopal Dhoot has Transformed Videocon From a Rs 7,200 Crore Indian Company to a Rs 17,500 Crore Global One Without Spending a Rupee. That Was the Easy Part.

Summary

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For a man who claims he can earn his livelihood by playing the flute-he is a trained flautist-53-year-old Venugopal Dhoot, Chairman of the Videocon Group, has quite an ambition, to head a global business empire. He played this out to perfection last fortnight. First, on June 28, Videocon sewed up the euro 240-million (Rs 1,248 crore) acquisition of French media and electronics major Thomson sa's Colour Picture Tube (CPT) and CPT glass business across China, Poland and Mexico (the company had acquired Thomson's Italian CPT plant a month ago, in a separate $100-million or Rs 440-crore deal). Then, on July 7, it announced the much-anticipated takeover of Swedish white goods major AB Electrolux's loss making Indian operations, Electrolux Kelvinator Limited (EKL).

With the two deals (see The Tale Of Two Deals) Dhoot has broken into the rarefied reaches of India Inc., hitherto the preserve of Old Money like the Birlas, Tatas and Ambanis or new-age upstarts such as K. Anji Reddy and N.R. Narayana Murthy. That should give the son of a sugar-mill owner from Gangapur in Maharashtra some satisfaction. Videocon and Dhoot have been around in public consciousness since 1987 (that was the year Videocon International, the consumer electronics firm was born), but neither has received the kind of respect groups of that size and individuals heading such companies do. The group's success in consumer electronics and appliances has always been attributed to such things as price or dealer-incentives and Dhoot, despite his track record at running Videocon and sterling connections (Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, Railways Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav and Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel were all present at the party he threw to celebrate the Thomson deal) has always been seen as a bit of an outsider in Mumbai's business circles.

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The Great Gambler ; in 10 Days, Chairman Venugopal Dhoot has Transformed Videocon From a Rs 7,200 Crore Indian Company to a Rs 17,500 Crore Global One Without Spending a Rupee. That Was the Easy Part.

The Thomson and Electrolux deals should change some of that. The Videocon Group has suddenly become a Rs 17,500-crore entity with a global manufacturing footprint. And Dhoot, who has spent nothing on the deals, (see Deal Mechanics) is increasingly being seen as a finance whiz. "I like what he's achieved with Thomson and Electrolux," says Lakshmi Mittal of Mittal Steel, a close friend and advisor. " Videocon has today emerged as a strong player, both in India and globally." Indeed, Videocon's global CPT capacity of 19- million-units-a-year compares favourably with LG-Philips Display's 38 million, Samsung's 32 million and Matsushita's 12 million. And in the Rs 20,000-crore Indian consumer electronics and appliances market, Videocon has held its own against the Koreans, thanks largely to a multi-brand strategy that should now ...

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