Companies that changed India

The dozen companies that transformed not only themselves, but also the larger universe around them.

GENPACT
In 1997, Jack Welch, General Electric's CEO then, decided tosend some mortgage and insurance application work to a small team in Gurgaon.By 2002, that work had expanded to a 10,000-people company and was the biggestpart of GE Capital, remembers Tiger Tyagarajan, President and CEO today ofGenpact, the GE business process outsourcing, or BPO, firm. Genpact is today a$1.5 billion business but GE's bigger contribution is India's $6 billion BPO industry.

ZEE TV
India's busy satellite TV industry traces its origins to a visit nearly 22 years ago by a Punjabi rice trader to the Mumbai office of national broadcaster Doordarshan. Subhash Chandra, worked around rules that gave Doordarshan a monopoly, by beaming 'Zee TV'-branded Indian content from Hong Kong in October 1992. The laws eventually changed and, today, there are more than 600 channels in India stoking aspirations even in corners that have no water or tarred roads.

GUJARAT COOPERATIVE MILK MARKETING FEDERATION
India is the world's largest producer of milk, the richest source of protein for children, with a production of some 118 million tonnes. Much of the credit for this vests at Kaira, Gujarat, where a mechanical engineer, Verghese Kurien, set up a dairy in 1948. And, more importantly, helped local headman Tribhuvandas Patel organise a cooperative of dairy farmers. That effort grew into the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation, or GCMMF, the Amul brand and, later, a nationwide grid of district milk cooperatives under Operation Flood.

TETLEY
You had to be a reader of tea leaves in 2000 to predict a deluge of takeover deals in the decade ahead. But the $450-million acquisition of Tetley in the UK in February 2000 by Tata Tea indeed set the stage for buyouts. Tata Tea's revenues, for historical context, were one-third of Tetley's. "The deal was the single biggest catalyst for cross-border acquisitions in India and was certainly a harbinger of things to come," says Rana Kapoor, Managing Director and Chief Executive of YES Bank, who advised Tata Tea as CEO of Rabo India Finance, and arranged the debt for the buyout then.

CAFE COFFEE DAY
Selling coffee in Delhi? The idea of selling the beverage associated with Madrasis in the capital would have been sniggered at a decade ago or so. Not after the success of V.G. Siddhartha-founded Cafe Coffee Day. The 1,240-store CCD, as the chain is called in short, has 170 stores in the National Capital Region - just five short of the number in Bangalore. Besides introducing the taste of coffee to traditional tea belts, what the marquee chain quietly ushered in is a wave of cafe culture in India's small towns.

ICICI
In the mid-1990s, India was gaining momentum, walking away from a socialist past, but banking still meant corporate banking with little focus on retail lending. It was as if the retail customer did not exist and little attention was paid to investing in technology or creating a branch infrastructure. But, a lender with a hoary past, ICICI - short for Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India - changed this with aggression in marketing, competitive pricing and doses of innovations.

NSE
From a transparency point of view, there are few parallelsto the National Stock Exchange, or NSE, in India. An institution that canrightfully claim it changed equity trading in India through clear rules backedwith technology and risk-avoiding margins. NSE has spread into even tiny towns usheringin a true equity culture and its daily turnover today is in excess of Rs 10,000crore.

AIRTEL
Migration in India, sociologists posit, has ratcheted up in the second decade of reforms. Is it just the roaring economy that is behind it? The pop anthropologist thinks there is another reason too: an estimated half a billion mobile phone users in India. In 2001, the total number of phones was just 45 million. For the migrant, distance is dead, truly; everybody is just a phone call away. It helps that even a five-minute call will not cost more than the cheapest filter cigarette of the land. Who got it there? A company called Bharti Airtel, India's No.1 phone firm today and the world's sixth by customers.

BIG BAZAAR
When he started out, Kishore Biyani was so impressed by the likes of Wal-Mart and Tesco that he began his early Big Bazaar stores with well-organised shelves, properly labelled aisles, and staff trained to be professional and helpful. Sales were tepid. Biyani spotted the missing ingredient quickly: the chaos, bustle and noise of a local Indian market. Authors John Mullins and Randy Komisar note that he quickly shuffled around shelves, made the aisles narrower leaving things in the way, and got staff to announce offers over the PA system every couple of minutes. It worked. Over the years, Biyani made mistakes - overleveraging his cash flows, for instance - but he unveiled the power of organised retail, and that too without any foreign partner.

JET AIRWAYS
Subroto Bagchi, co-founder of MindTree Consulting, ranks Jet Airways on his list of dream companies. Jet has lost some market value lately, but what impresses Bagchi is how its personnel look after passengers, both in the sky and on the ground. Nothing extraordinary today, but in the mid-1990s, customer service levels were set by monopoly providers such as Indian Airlines or public sector banks. In such a market, Jet Airways redefined it.

MARUTI
In 1983, Maruti Udyog, as the carmaker was called then, rolled out India's first all-Japanese hatchback, the Maruti 800. It was small compared to the soap dish-like Ambassador and the Fiat-designed Premier Padmini but partner Suzuki's technology made the it zippy, easy to drive and, relatively speaking, club-class comfortable. And, cheaper: some Rs 45,000, less than half the cost of an Ambassador then. The car grabbed the middle class Indian's imagination and before the decade turned, it was the preferred choice among cars made in India.

INFOSYS
At its core, the Infosys business model is nothing highbrow. It mostly ships fairly mundane information technology tasks like developing and maintaining an application to India, or remotely manages a client's network from here. Where it shone was in the way it ran its business: sharing wealth with employees, refusing to grease palms, focusing on systems and processes to sustain business, encouraging meritocracy, and obsessing over quality of work and delivery.