Not just a paper king

He’s in expansion mode. After reconquering the paper market, which BILT, his flagship company, had long dominated and then lost, he has branched into agriculture and farming. And now, there’s a buzz that he may soon acquire the financial services arm of a bank. If the deal does happen, it will mark a return of sorts to an old family domain—the Thapars controlled Oriental Bank of Commerce before it was nationalised.

From being a fringe member of the Thapar family to the head of its most powerful branch, Gautam Thapar has come a long way. He cut his teeth in the group by turning around Ballarpur Industries, and has taken the group’s turnover to beyond $3 billion (Rs 12,900 crore). L.M. Thapar’s nephew—he is the son of Lalit Mohan Thapar’s elder brother, Brij Mohan Thapar—has shown that suffering fools is not his core competence.BILT is a unique case study, where the competitor company, responsible for its depleting market share—Sinar Mas Pulp and Paper India, a subsidiary of the Indonesian paper giant, Asia Pulp and Paper—was acquired by the runner-up in the marketplace for Rs 530 crore.

Name: Gautam Thapar Age: 47 Designation: Chairman Company: Avantha Group

Known to be aggressive in his professional dealings, Thapar, who is obsessively media-shy, has rebuilt the empire left to him by LMT, overshadowing all other branches of the Thapar family—diversifying into power generation and IT.

The renaming of the group as Avantha marks a clean cut from the past. LMT, as a member of the Bombay Club, fought against liberalisation.

But the younger Thapar is spreading his wings globally, having acquired Malaysia’s Sabah Forest Industries for $261 million (Rs 1,122.3 crore), Belgian Intergarden Group and Belgian power equipment company, Pauwels, for a little over m32 million (Rs 214.4 crore).

—Tejeesh N.S. Behl