• Opportunities

At 68, Deepak Puri is an active man. Emerging out of a board meeting, Puri says that it’s his son Ratul Puri who holds the reigns of Moser Baer India, while he only shows him the way. “I have stepped back quite a bit,” says the senior Puri. “My son handles the business.”

Puri always hoped to be more than just another businessman, even setting audacious goals for himself at times. But he has been far ahead of his peers in gauging the next technological trend. By setting benchmark prices in the recordable CD and DVD segment, Puri has single-handedly and doggedly made his company a household name.

Coming from a family of landlords in Lahore, Puri studied in Delhi and then earned his degree in chemical engineering from the Imperial College in London. “I knew I could not work for someone else,” says Puri. “When I was very young, I always knew I had to start something of my own, even if it meant trading. My parents were very well-to-do landowners, but I did not want to live off their money. I love challenges; I feel a person will vegetate if there are no challenges.”

Upon returning to Delhi, Puri joined an American oil company and worked there for nine months, picking up invaluable knowledge on commerce and business. Relocating to Kolkata, he took up a job as an assistant executive at Shalimar Paints. But eight months later, he was sure that he wanted to start out on his own.

“It was not a very easy thing to do, as I did not have money [at the time],” Puri recounts. “When I resigned in 1965, my father supplemented [my income] to a certain degree, and I started trading to build capital.”

Puri’s formula was simple. Leveraging his friendship with people in Kolkata, he bought on credit as well as sold on credit, but on a lesser credit time. This meant that he always had some money as his margin, and was able to repay his debt on time.

Not being a finance man, Puri says his business plans were average at best; for him, the critical issue was always to repay his debts within the stipulated time. “After trading for a year, I was impatient to start something on my own,” says Puri.

Puri started operations in a modest manner, manufacturing steel windows in a small, rented factory. “I made a little bit of money and progressed to aluminum. Talking about it takes three to four minutes, but in reality, it took me a decade,” he says.

From aluminum windows, Puri moved on to hard core manufacturing with aluminum wires, aluminum rivets for MIG aircrafts, pipes and overhead transmission wires. Despite a turnover of about Rs.2 crore and profits of about Rs.40 lakh, Puri thought it wise to move out of West Bengal. “Labor problems aside, there was no electricity in Kolkata for 8-10 hours each day back then. By the 1980s, I decided to leave Kolkata,” he says.

Relocating to Delhi, Puri was back in action. He founded Moser Baer India—a time recorder unit—in 1983, in technical collaboration with Moser Baer, Switzerland. Puri held 51 percent stake in the company, and Moser Baer, SA, the remaining. “We soon found that it didn’t have a very large market. So, I sought advice from an old friend of mine who was working at IDM.” IDM had evolved from IBM.

At that time, Puri was just about managing sales of Rs.14 lakh-Rs.15 lakh and needed something to help spur sales. “My friend walked round to his office and returned with an 8-inch square piece, which he called a ‘floppy disk’. I had no idea what it was, since computers were a novelty at that time.”

Inspired by the possibilities, Puri got in touch with Xidex Magnetics, the American producers of the floppy disk. Soon a technical collaboration agreement was inked. In 1988, Moser Baer India moved into the data storage segment by manufacturing 5.25-inch floppy disks, and was manufacturing 3.5-inch micro floppy diskettes (MFD) by 1993. In 1999, Moser Baer India set up a 150 million unit capacity plant to manufacture recordable compact disks (CD-Rs) and recordable digital versatile disks (DVD-Rs). More was to follow.

With India being the largest producer of movies in the world, Moser Baer gradually began buying movie rights. “Three and a half years ago, we started buying movie content,” says Puri.

“Within 11 months, we had bought out 30 percent of the movies in India. Till date, we have bought out about 45 percent of the movies. We are the largest IP holders and sold at a game changing price of Rs.28 and Rs.35, which increased volumes to 75-80 million pieces a year. We will soon record 120-150 million pieces a year.”

So, what’s next for Moser Baer? Puri says Blu-rays are leading the way into the future; five years from now, Blu-rays will have a higher speed and will be followed by holographic disks of about 250 gigabytes. Today, Moser Baer is the only company outside Japan to manufacture Blu-ray discs. “Being ahead of the crowd ensured our success,” Puri says.

But, is Puri spreading the company too fast? How viable is betting too much in a sector where technology is evolving faster than ever?

©Entrepreneur May 2010

Tags:
Deepak Puri, Moser Baer