S. RAMAKRISHNA KARUTURI

43, EXPORTER,
MD, KARUTURI GLOBAL.
INITIAL INVESTMENT:IN 1996 Rs 1.14 lakh.
CURRENT TURNOVER :Rs 400 crore.



SUCCESS MANTRA: Never faced an obstacle. The big challenge is your own imagination.
ROLE MODEL: Ratan Tata for daring to dream of the Indica and now the Nano.
GREATEST MOMENT: When he brought a chartered 757 to Bangalore in 2000 to export
his roses.
HISTORY:

• 1995: Incorporated Karuturi Floritech - a 100% EOU unit for floriculture.
• 1996: Established first production facility near Bangalore
• 1999: Set up an Internet Auction Portal by the name Rose Bazaar.com to derive benefits of disintermediation through use of Internet. Set up second production facility for roses near Bangalore taking the total size of rose farms to 10 hectares.
• 2000: In keeping with the changing focus, the Company changed its name from Karuturi Floritech Ltd., to Karuturi.com Ltd.
• 2001: Invested in a private Satellite Gateway and an IDC as a part of the Rose Bazaar initiative. The Company also got Class .B. ISP licence from the Department of telecom as a statutory requirement for a private Internet Satellite Gateway and has since been renamed Karuturi Global Ltd. To use surplus bandwidth capacity, the Company started selling VPN circuits and leased line circuits to quality conscious corporates with Ultimate selling point (USP) of near IPLC quality with 640 ms latency non shared bandwidth.
• 2003: Emerged as the lowest cost rose grower and the largest rose producer in the country.
• 2004: Conceptualised the Ethiopian initiative and set up a wholly owned subsidiary in Ethiopia, Africa, called Ethiopian Meadows Plc to produce HT cut roses.
• 2005: Conceptualised the synergistic foray into processed foods . gherkins.
• 2006: Received the largest order for roses in its history from the latest retail chain in UK. Embarked on setting up a gherkins bottling plant.

The company was initially set up as Karuturi Floritech in Doddaballapur, near Bangalore with an annual capacity to process 12 million premium cut roses at its state-of-the-art facilities. The company has set up a wholly owned subsidiary in Ethiopia, Africa – Ethiopian Meadows Plc - to produce roses with a special focus on HT roses. And today with the combined production capacities of India and Ethiopia, Karuturi ranks amongst one the largest cut rose producers in the world with a strong global presence. In addition to cut roses, the company also supplies cut rose products such as rose plants, coco peat and coco cups to customers across over 15 countries including Holland, Germany, United Kingdom, Italy, Singapore, Taiwan, Bahrain, Muscat, Dubai, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Brunei and across North America.

With its latest acquisition—Sher Agencies, Kenya, in the last financial year—Karuturi Global
Limited (KGL) became the first fully integrated Indian MNC in the field of agriculture. Taking the world’s largest producer and exporter of cut roses towards an even rosier future is its managing director, Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi, 43. The story goes that in 1995 he was looking to buy flowers for his wife on Valentine’s Day and found an acute shortage of good roses in Bangalore. This was when he decided to get into the business himself.
Incorporated in 1994-95, Karuturi Global Limited is engaged in three businesses now: floriculture, processing foods – gherkins, and information technology. “I was influenced by management guru Michael Porter’s model of sustainable competitive advantage,” says Karuturi of his journey on the flower carpet. “I identified high value horticulture as an area with immense potential.” With rose farms on 298 hectares (not including 40 hectares in India under contract farming) spread over India, Kenya and Ethiopia, Karuturi is a globetrotting flower merchant. His global empire of roses started “with a shoestring budget, out of a room in my flat. But those were great days,” he reminisces. What started with 3.2 hectares on the outskirts of Bangalore, today has operations spread across three countries and marketing offices in Dubai and The Netherlands.
Growing at over 30% annually, the company acquired one lakh acres of land in May this year, and will soon add 6.5 lakh acres on long lease in Ethiopia for which he has garnered $250 million through debt and equity. This addition will put Karuturi on the fast track as a horticulture major. Here he plans to grow paddy, palm and sugarcane for both sugar and ethanol, while other crops such as sorghum and vegetables would be rotated to take advantage of the growing global demand for these commodities.
Schooled at the Sri Rama Krishna Vidyashala, Mysore, followed by post-graduation from Bangalore University, Karuturi got his MBA from the Case Western Reserve University where he made it to the Dean’s Honour’s List. He came back to take over his family business of cables and transmission towers. Wife Anita is the finance director of KGL and the couple has three daughters. He lives in Bangalore and is “at home by 7 p.m. to spend time with the family as I consider that very important,” says Karuturi, whose nonflower interests include reading fiction, watching films and going to the gym.
He cherishes two moments: “When I brought a chartered 757 to Bangalore in 2000 to export the roses and, in 2007, when we became the world’s largest rose company.” He opened the first rose boutique at the Bangalore International Airport last year and expects to start 100 similar boutiques over the next two years. Expansion plans include production of gherkins as well as farming corn, palm oil, rice, vegetables and sugarcane on the recently acquired three lakh hectares of land and increasing staff strength from the current 10,000 to 50,000 employees by the turn of the decade. But as of now, the mainstay of the business continues to be roses with a target to reach one billion stems by 2010.
The company is going to process crude palm oil for trading in ethanol. With the global energy crisis getting serious, there are plans for tapping the big oil companies selling ethanol for blending with petrol, he says. When he is not dabbling in shipping roses to almost all of the worlds big chains, horticulture and his Bangalore-based internet connectivity business, he likes to go on long drives with his family. Through his business he has come across some interesting clients like a UK customer who wanted a heart-shaped bouquet made with 2,000 roses. Now that must have blown away his fianc says Karuturi with a guffaw.
Much in the same way as he has ridden over competition from around the world and come up trumps. He got his largest order in 2006 from Tesco. Since then, all the partnerships with the retail chains have endured. No wonder, Karuturi still sends roses to people. Can’t think of a better gift.

DEEPAK PURI,(66) & RATUL PURI (37)
DEEPAK (LEFT) AND RATUL PURI AT THIER OFFICE IN DELHI

OPTICAL STORAGE MANUFACTURERS: M O S E R   B A E R
INTIAL INVESTMENT:IN 1983 Rs 50,000
CURRENT TURNOVER :Rs 495 crore
An IIT and IIM graduate who saw the future in low cost retail. Two hoteliers who have made restoration the core of their growing empire.A woman who caught the beauty boom at the right time. Two brothers who understood the transformative power of reality television in small-town India. Three friends who believed that partying would become a profession in itself. And a former corporate executive who turned a stray reflection into an Internet portal with 15 million registered users. These are men and women who embody what iconic investor Warren Buffet once said: “Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”Make that a short time ago.

SUCCESS MANTRA:Never think small.The effort or the pain is the same,whatever the scale of business.
BIGGEST VICTORY:Contributed to the decline of piracy because of its low-priced movie
CDs and DVDs.
PERSONAL TAKE:The company’s logo was modified and its addresses always add up to 6 or 9, due to Vaastu reasons.
ONE OF DEEPAK PURI’S MOST INNOVATIVE MARKETING STRATEGIES: WAS TO SELL HIS CDS THROUGH PUSH CARTS IN HIGH-COST BUT LOW-SPACE AREAS.

While coming back from Dalhousie last year, thanks to a cancelled flight, Deepak Puri, the chairman of Moser Baer, was forced to take a train. At Pathankot, two push carts were selling his CDs. Business was brisk, and they managed to sell quite a few. A few months later, at an upmarket store in Delhi’s Khan Market, Puri discovered that the shopkeeper stacked only two of his titles. The reason: he would make a fatter margin—Rs 150 on a Rs 300 CD compared to Rs 8 on Moser Baer’s Rs 28 CD. “To make the same margin, I’d have to sell 18 of these CDs”, he told Puri. Back in office, Puri immediately called his marketing executives and decided to restrategise. This involved selling his CDs in push carts in high-cost low-space areas, a model that has become a success. This ability to adapt and innovate in real time makes Moser Baer agile. After proving its success in the optical storage business ($500 million), the company is now aiming for the sun—it anticipates its three-year-old solar photovoltaic cells business to be as big, by year-end. It has revolutionised the entertainment space through its low-cost CD and DVD-based movies, priced between Rs 28 and Rs 35, while also foraying into IT peripherals and film production. Puri has come a long way. A mechanical engineer from Imperial College, London, he started with a time recorder unit, moved to manufacturing floppy disks and is now the world’s second largest optical storage media manufacturer. His initial investment—a loan of Rs 50,000 was taken on a collateral which was nothing more than “the shirt on my back and a passion to do business”. The journey has not been without its challenges. Whether it was fighting anti-dumping cases imposed by the European Commission in 2003 or dealing with plummeting prices and market capitalisation, thanks to a global glut of DVDs in 2004, Moser Baer has managed to emerge victorious. Even now, the company has reported a net loss of Rs 104 crore in the firstquarter of 2008-09, thanks to the adverse movement of foreign exchange. But Puri believes for every problem that seems insurmountable, there is an alternative course of action. The company is betting on Blu-ray, which is emerging as a dominant optical format, as well as the photovoltaic and entertainment businesses which are expected to deliver significant growth.
“I have never dreamt small,” he says. “The effort that goes in is the same, whatever the capacity.” His son Ratul Puri, an executive director, and a computer engineer from the Carnegie Mellon University in the US, echoes his words: “Scale excites me. I don’t believe in niches.” But where the duo is similar, they are also distinctly different. If the senior Puri follows instinct, the
junior Puri is more analytical. Yet they complement each other. “Like kathak dancers,” says
Deepak, “we can anticipate each other’s moves.” The Puris believe in Vaastu. Not only was the
company’s logo modified—the ‘o’ in Moser became red as did the Baer—but also the company’s addresses have always added up to 6 or 9. Even the address of their upcoming thin film PV plant in Chennai, was changed for Vaastu reasons. Going forward, Ratul too wants to assume an overarching role in the business. Each of the company’s verticals is run by a CEO, who reports to him. “Every time you double your turnover, how you manage your business changes,” he says. “Initially you’re an entrepreneur, then systems and processes take over and finally you create entrepreneurs within an organisation,” says Ratul. Wise words from a quick learner.