(Member, The Sanmar Group Corporate Board, and Managing Director, IMA India)
Adit Jain, Founder and Managing Director of IMA India also runs the India CEO Forum and organises the Annual Economist Conferences Round Table with the Government of India. Widely regarded as a witty, articulate speaker on India’s politics and economics, Jain brings an incisive mind to the table at the deliberations of The Sanmar Group Corporate Board. Here he shares some of his views on Sanmar and India at large with Matrix.
Can you go back to the first time you came into contact with Sanmar?
It must have been six years ago, when we were marketing our CEO forum and I may have called upon Mr Sankar to invite him to join the forum. I subsequently invited him to come and speak at a CEO meeting in Goa. I remember the topic was “Running joint ventures in India”.
Was there a chemistry between the two of
you fairly instantly?
Mr Sankar was in a completely different league from me. I have always held him in high esteem.
How much did you enjoy the Aware Professional training programme you conducted for the Sanmar Group?
We really enjoyed running it, and felt grateful and rewarded when Sanmar extended it for a second year. Frankly, you run out of things to say over time, but the fact Sanmar extended it seemed to suggest those who attended the programme found value in it. As it happened, that gave us the foundation for another interesting idea. I am now negotiating with business schools to offer executive programmes both open enrolment programmes and company programmes.
Once that is tied up, we may come back and ask Sanmar if they would like to have another go.
In Sanmar, we pride ourselves on our intellectual capital. What has been your experience with Sanmar’s people?
The pride is completely justified. It was firstly brave of Mr Sankar, Mr Radhakrishnan and Ms Sarada Jagan to try us out. We are not a training company. As we run forums for CEOs and CFOs, we have a fair amount of content and knowledge. But training executives requires different skill sets, and I thought it was rather farsighted of them to give the programme a trial. When we actually ran the programme, we found the entire company very challenging. Everybody asked difficult, provocative questions. I had the opportunity to present two or three times, when I was put in the hot spot.
You have been in the Chemplast board for a while and are now in the Group Corporate Board. How has the experience been so far?
Very rewarding. I do sit in a few other boards, like British Gas in India. I think this is most exciting as it is a much bigger company. The British Gas business in India is quite large, but it focuses on one product. The issues and challenges here are quite different. The opportunity to participate in a discussion in a group with five important interests is from my perspective very useful.
What are your views on Sanmar’s commitment to corporate governance?
Of the highest standards. I am very pleased to say that following the AWARE leadership programme we ran, the company commissioned an ethics and compliance manual and possibly used one of the best guys in the country to do it - Dipankar Gupta, a Professor at JNU. I think he was very impressed.
What is your area of focus in your contribution to the Group Corporate Board?
I often ask myself what value I bring to another company. I run a business information company where we do consultancy and advisory work for specific clients. But most important, we have CEO and CFO peer group forums which I chair and these two forums constitute 450 corporations operating in India.
The real benefit I extract from these forums is that I get to share the experience of CEOs and CFOs across industry segments on how they handle tricky situations. These are frank, open discussions. In a sense I could bring value because I have exposure to a large number of corporations who pay us an annual retainer fee and with whom we interact constantly.
But as for my domain knowledge, I am a political, economic and business analyst, dealing with issues of the economy or the political environment, to do with forecasting interest rates, exchange rates and so on. I also believe I could add value in company related issues which have to do with price management and risk management, as I have been through similar situations for other clients,though at Sanmar such an opportunity is yet to present itself.
What is your forecast for the near future
econom
ically — and politically—for India?
The economy seems to be in fine form. I think this year we will have about 6.5 to 7% growth. This euphoria we are currently going through will change though. Currently everybody is buying everything that’s being produced— motorcycles, washing machines etc. I think that is going to change. My suspicion is very soon or in the first quarter, we will see a slight slowdown. In the next three to four years, the economic growth will vary between 6.5 and 7.5% and this is a 60% probability. 20% probability will be that the growth would be higher than 7.5% and 20% probability that it could be less than 6.5%.
Politically, the current government will plod along. I don’t think its performance has been outstanding, though it hasn’t done too badly either. Manmohan Singh has been able to keep his wobbly coalition going. He is credible. I have a suspicion that there might be some rumblings among partners like the DMK and the Left, as they come closer to the provincial elections in Bengal and Tamil Nadu. The BJP ought to put up a show in terms of opposition, but it hasn’t done much. It is in such disarray now. You need to have a strong, solid opposition to put the government on its toes.