The Venture Intelligence Blog

Economic Times has article on the trend of PE firms aggressively recruiting CEOs or CEOs-in-waiting for their portfolio companies. Recently, Actis placed ex-MD Nokia Sanjeev Sharma in Phoenix Lamps, while Softbank Asia Infrastructure Fund (SAIF Partners) placed Sundeep Malhotra , ex-EVP Pepsico Foods, in TV18's home-shopping division . Similarly, Carlyle placed ex-CFO and chief risk officer at Infosys' Progeon, Ramesh Kamath , as CFO of QuEST Global and Infrastructure Development Finance placed ex-CEO , NetKraft, Anand Sudarshan, in Manipal Health Systems along with Narayana Swamy as the CFO. And there's more where they're coming from. Most PE firms have a 'cadre' CEOs waiting in their ranks - Actis has Rajeev Kaul, who joined them from Microsoft and Baring PE has Ajit Singh Karan, who joined from the liquid mosquito repellent brand, All Out. In fact, some headhunters claim to be working in tandem with PE firms to place CEOs. Arun Natarajan is the Founder of Ve...

VC Brad Feld has a humourous post on his blog listing his complaints on accountants - especially the Big 4. Accounting is the only profession where you can completely screw everything up (see Enron, WorldCom, Kmart, etc..) and your “punishment” (so long as you aren’t Arthur Andersen) is that the “powers that be” enact all sorts of legislation (SOX, Option Expensing, 409A, FASB 123, etc.), that create a full employment act for your profession, radically increase your fee structures, and make everyone in your profession better off than when everyone thought you were doing a good job and maintaining the public trust. ...We’ve had a hell of a time getting any of the Big Four to want to work with our portfolio companies and those that do are paying a very high price. It isn’t like the 1990's where they were all fighting over our companies hoping they’d go public. Right now they have so much work to do in the public sector that they can’t make enough money on the private companies. T...

Business Today has an article on the dynamics of marketing to India rural and small town India. According to the census of India, villages with clear surveyed boundaries not having a municipality, corporation or board, with density of population not more than 400 sq. km and with at least 75 per cent of the male working population engaged in agriculture and allied activities would quality as rural. According to this definition, there are 585,764 villages in the country. Of these, only 0.5 per cent have a population above 10,000, and 2 per cent have population between 5,000 and 10,000. Around 50 per cent of the villages have population between 200 and 1,000, and another 18 per cent has a population less than 200. Interestingly, for FMCG and consumer durable companies, any territory that has more than 20,000 and 50,000 population, respectively, is rural market. So, for them, it is not rural India which is rural. According to them, it is the Class-II and III towns that are rural. Accordin...

Business Today has a short profile of Malaysia-based PE firm Navis, which is a majority investor in three Indian Food & Beverage firms - Sky Gourmet, Mars Restaurants and Nirula's. For Navis, food is one of the most "empirically analysable business." Simply put, not only is it possible for Navis to link the profitability of an outlet to its location and its socio-economics, it is also possible for the firm to assess future profitability. "The range of uncertainty in any retail concept is much narrower than in say technology." Then, Navis is not foraging only for food in India. Bloy is ready to invest up to $300 million (Rs 1,410 crore) over the next five years in India. "Any business related to consumer spending or even the light industrial sectors would be interesting." Navis is in talks with a packaging company and another that supplies storage tanks and pipelines, and expects to close at least one deal by 2006-end. Arun Natarajan is the Founde...

Business Today has a cover story ranking and profiling the top ten Indian cities, with a suitably humble tone. This is not how best cities are supposed to be. Best cities aren't supposed to erupt in violence if an ageing movie star dies at the grand age of 77, like Bangalore did when Rajkumar died on April 12. Neither are best cities supposed to let walk-in bombers massacre home-bound rail commuters like Mumbai allowed on July 11, when more than 200 people died. Best cities are supposed to be places where all their inhabitants can find material and spiritual fulfilment. The fact that none of India's cities is so, drives home a grim fact about our fifth Best Cities for Business survey: These are best of the worst cities. Power cuts, water scarcity, congested roads, pollution, dirt and roadside squalor are par for the course at almost all Indian cities. Yet, it is these overcrowded and crumbling cities that drive India and make it the second-fastest growing economy in the world....

At the 2005 Paris air-show, low-cost airline start-up made a splash by announcing an order for 100 Airbus aircrafts. Businessworld has an interview with IndiGo co-founder and former US Airways CEO Rakesh Gangwal in which he talks about the mega order. ( IndiGo has launched flights starting August 4). It is a firm order for 100 aircraft, with no options. One, for a start-up airline to order 100 planes — it’s the first in aviation history. Two, for all aircraft to be firm orders is equally unheard of. We’ve to take delivery of all, else there are penalties. There are enormous flexibilities built into the deal because the marketplace changes. You may want to induct planes faster because the market has picked up, or defer them due to a slowdown. We have a 10-year contract. That’s too long a time. We hope to take all sooner. Business Today has an update on this year's large airplane orders. After last year's $13 billion splurge at the Paris air show and another couple of billion ...

Mark Sherman of Battery Ventures has a launched a new blog titled ABCDVC.com focusing on India investments. The first couple of posts - here and here - provide a profile of various Silicon Valley VCs as well as local VC funds with SV connections entering the country. First of all, by ABCD, I mean American Born Commuting (to) Desh. I firmly believe that India will become one of the core venture hubs of the world: Silicon Valley, Route 128, Israel, Bangalore, etc. I first visited India in 1992 for fun and have been visiting India 3 or 4 times per year for the last few years to better understand its markets. One of the good fortunes of being based in Silicon Valley is that I see many more Indian-based management teams as they visit the Bay Area to visit customers, partners, family, etc. Having been part of the technology boom of the 1990s, I hope to re-live the good parts of this experience as India emerges into an exciting emerging market of venture capital activity. Arun Natarajan ...

Businessworld has an article on the opportunities and the policy bottlenecks facing bio-fuels companies in India, including an interview with Vinod Khosla. The most encouraging signal so far has been the $9.4 million that BP is investing in the TERI project. This is a vast project covering 8,000 hectares in Andhra Pradesh to show the viability of producing bio-diesel from jatropha. This is a sign that big bucks might still be coming India’s way. D1 Oils of the UK has already invested Rs 6 crore in a small project in Tamil Nadu and is aiming for a 70,000-hectare spread over the next year. Sarju Singh, managing director, D1 Oils (India), says if India does not have a clear-cut pricing policy and some rebates, it will channel the entire production to exports, where prices are firming up. Shirke, meanwhile, has tied up with Sejati Biotech of Malaysia and a Chinese firm to set up a 60,000-hectare plantation in Papua New Guinea and later on a massive 300,000-hectare project in Indonesia. Sa...

In the last several years, we have witnessed several incubators being set up at leading Indian universities as well as a few in the private sector. However, so far, there has not been any tremendously successful company that has emerged out of these programs. VC Matthew McCall has made some recent posts here and here on incubators that provide some clues. The notion of co-locating start-ups together makes sense at a high level, but fails to work on the ground. Networking, mentoring, sharing, etc all work when the entities/companies involved are of similiar caliber, have similiar issues and are playing in the big leagues. However, often, you have a building full of inexperienced or small entrepreneurs attacking niche issues in a broad array of industries. There is not a lot that they can teach each other. If there is a breakout company, it is so focused on building its business, that it doesn't have the time or interest to pull up the other inhabitants with it. In fact, it will o...

Economic Times has an article on how PE firms are investing into companies where there is discord amongst promoter family members. Paras Pharmaceutical is the latest instance where one of the Patel brothers - Girish, Darshan, and Devendra - is reportedly selling his stake to Actis. Apparently, there is trouble brewing among the brothers. Similarly, it was differences within the family, which triggered the 51% equity sale of Nilgiri's Dairy to the same PE investor, according to sources close to the Bangalore-based company. In June, a clutch of PE players, Clearwater Capital, Olympus, and Voyager, bought out one of the brothers, Anil Kumar Sanghvi, from Sanghvi Motors to pick up a 23% stake in the company. Earlier, in a similar deal, Reliance Capital bought out one of two brothers, Debashish Chakraborty's 44% equity in the courier and express firm, DTDC. Apparently, the brothers (Shubhashish and Debashish) had differences over issues, sources told ET. Arun Natarajan is the Found...

In recent months, I’ve had the benefit of listening and talking to several Limited Partners, General Partners and Placement Agents. And learn how difficult it is to raise a venture capital fund in the current environment. Especially, if it is a first-time fund. (Hat's off Helion !). Here are some of my notes from these interactions. * The venture capital business requires LPs to put relatively small amounts of money to work - compared to investing large chunks in buyout and late-stage PE funds. To put a reasonable amount of their portfolios in the VC category, they need to deploy in several funds (including newer funds from existing portfolio firms). This is hard work - especially given that returns from the VC category (on an average) hasn't been too great in recent years. * Unless your existing fund is top quartile in terms of returns, fund raising is very tough. Creating outsized returns in your current fund is the best way to raise a second fund. * Proven teams can close a ...

Knowledge@Wharton has an interview with K. V. Kamath, CEO of ICICI Bank. We believe that to break into the top league of global banks, ICICI will have to follow a course that few banks in the world have done -- and that is, leverage the rural economy. This is something that most banks don't do because it requires hard work. Market share is not easy to achieve because you need to widen your product tree. An even greater challenge is that you need to learn to do business at a fraction of the cost that you are used to. So our challenge is to invent a new business model where we can create a distribution base effectively in 600,000 villages in India, and to learn to do that at one-tenth the cost of urban India. Just to put that on a scale that someone could understand, we believe that to succeed in urban India, we need to do be able to do business at one-tenth the cost of the West. The reason is that the ticket size of the banking product in India is one-tenth that in the West. If it ...