From Ankleshwar shifts to the capital plan

Mandate

Decide where the company should commit reactor capacity after the China-plus-one surge, reduce customer concentration and settle the future of the legacy businesses.

Outcomes

• Recommended the ₹236 crore Sarigam multipurpose block in place of a ₹610 crore greenfield plant
• Led the ₹68 crore sale of the dye-intermediates business with all 164 employees transferred
• Reduced the largest customer's share of revenue from 31 to 21 per cent, with its two causes reported separately
• Introduced the 60 per cent signed-volume rule for new dedicated capacity

Decisions in context

I became chief strategy officer when enquiries were arriving faster than our plants could answer them, and the danger was that the company would mistake attention for demand. The first eighteen months went into evidence colleagues could test: an enquiry pipeline sorted by stage, a reactor-hour view of profitability and a monthly comparison of our prices with Chinese export prices. Those tools made the 2022 capacity decision arguable rather than intuitive. The harder work was with people. The dye sale needed patience with a founder, and the concentration plan required me to ask a colleague to give up resources from the account he and I had built together. I have no plant or sales line of my own, so I influence decisions through board papers and by stating plainly what each choice will cost.

Reason for the move

Current appointment; I am seeking a first independent directorship alongside it, with my board's consent.

Mandate

Extend the custom-synthesis discipline to the merchant intermediates business and build a pipeline beyond one European customer.

Outcomes

• Qualified the company with nine new customers in Europe, Japan and India
• Introduced contribution per reactor-hour as the ranking measure for new molecules
• Prepared the first segment-level return review, which later framed the dye-intermediates decision

Decisions in context

This role widened my responsibility from one business to the whole portfolio. I found that each segment priced its orders differently and none could compare its claim on reactors with another's. With finance and the plant heads we built a common measure of contribution per reactor-hour, and the first results were uncomfortable for every segment, including the one I had built. I also tried, with limited success, to diversify custom synthesis. We qualified with nine new customers, but most ordered small campaigns while Brakenholm Agro's volumes grew faster. By 2021 it was close to 30 per cent of company revenue. I raised the concentration risk in our review papers but did not ask for resources to address it until later. The pandemic years then brought a surge of enquiries that made concentration look like a lesser worry than capacity.

Reason for the move

Asked by the managing director and the board to take the newly created chief strategy officer role.

Mandate

Turn a consulting recommendation into an export custom-synthesis business serving crop-protection innovators.

Outcomes

• Increased qualified molecules from two to eleven
• Prepared Sarigam for its first European customer safety, effluent and quality audits, passed in 2015
• Negotiated the first raw-material price-adjustment clauses in our supply agreements

Decisions in context

I joined Saranvik to carry out what I had recommended as a consultant, and that was humbling. Innovator customers audit a supplier's safety, effluent handling and documentation before they discuss price, and Sarigam needed eighteen months of work before it passed its first European audit. I spent much of my time between customers' technical teams and our process chemists, translating a specification into a campaign the plant could run safely. The early contracts were small and slow. Brakenholm Agro's first order, in 2015, was a three-tonne validation campaign for a single intermediate. By 2018 we supplied it with four. I learnt that trust with an innovator is built one campaign at a time, and that a customer's growing confidence can quietly become its supplier's dependence if nobody is watching the balance.

Reason for the move

Promoted to lead portfolio and business development across the company.

Mandate

Build the firm's chemicals practice and lead market-entry and portfolio studies for Indian promoters.

Outcomes

• Led nineteen engagements for chemicals and engineering clients
• Built the firm's specialty-chemicals demand model, reused across later studies
• Led the 2012 custom-synthesis study for Saranvik

Decisions in context

Consulting gave me breadth quickly. Within two years I had worked on pigments, engineering plastics, pumps and fertiliser blending, usually for promoters deciding whether to enter or leave a market. I learnt to build a demand model from customs data, distributor interviews and plant visits, and to present it to a family that had run the business for decades. The most useful lessons came from our disappointments. Several clients accepted our analysis and then decided differently for reasons that never entered our models: an obligation to a long-standing customer, a son's ambitions, a lender's preference. I began asking about those factors at the start of an engagement rather than discovering them at the end. By 2013 I wanted to live with the consequences of a recommendation instead of handing it over in a final presentation.

Reason for the move

Invited by Saranvik's managing director to implement the custom-synthesis strategy as an executive.

Mandate

Develop Indian and European formulator accounts for the subsidiary's agrochemical intermediates.

Outcomes

• Grew the account base from 14 to 31 formulators
• Shortened the average qualification period for new customers from eleven months to seven
• Completed a part-time executive MBA in 2008

Decisions in context

I moved from production to the commercial side because I wanted to know why customers chose one supplier over another. The answer was rarely price alone. A formulator changing its source of an intermediate faced new impurity data, trial batches and sometimes regulatory submissions, so loyalty was partly a matter of switching cost. With our plant's quality team I prepared documentation packs that let customers qualify us faster, which mattered more than any discount we offered. I also saw how a multinational subsidiary allocates capacity: decisions about the Thane plant were shaped by the group's plants in Europe and Asia, and an Indian customer's urgency was one input among many. That taught me always to ask who actually controls a capacity decision. I studied for the executive MBA in evenings and at weekends.

Reason for the move

Moved into strategy consulting to work across more companies and more kinds of decision.

Mandate

Run nitration and sulphonation batches safely and to yield, then manage a production section.

Outcomes

• Raised section yield on a principal intermediate by four percentage points through batch-sheet changes
• Reduced acid consumption per batch with the effluent team's support
• Qualified as shift-in-charge in 2001

Decisions in context

Narmavati was where I learnt the physical facts behind every later strategy paper. A batch had a recipe, a temperature limit and an effluent consequence, and a mistake in any of them could hurt someone. I started on rotating shifts, learning from operators who had run the same reactors for years, and in 2001 I took charge of a section. We improved yields by tightening batch-sheet discipline and by listening to the shift chemists about raw-material variation. Yet by 2003 better operations could not offset the prices of Chinese intermediates arriving through Surat traders. The promoters closed a product line and reduced shifts. I did not fully understand the economics then, but I understood that the plant's future had been decided somewhere outside it, and I wanted to work where such decisions were made.

Reason for the move

Left for a commercial role with a multinational subsidiary, to learn why customers choose their suppliers.