Wired to Shine

By Shereen Bhan

At just 27, Laksh Vaaman Sehgal, a graduate from Columbia Business School and a second-generation entrepreneur, is driving a 34-year-old company forward. Samvardhana Motherson Group was started by his grandmother and father (that’s why the name: “mother-son”) as a wire harness manufacturing company in 1975 with just Rs. 1,000. Today, it is a thriving auto ancillary business that has grossed revenues of over Rs. 7,000 crore.
Shereen Bhan (SB): You didn’t start at the top. Instead, you trained in different group companies—not just in India, but also in Japan and Germany for three years—before joining the Samvardhana Motherson Group in 2007. How were you introduced to the business?
Laksh Vaaman Sehgal (LVS): My father got me involved in the business at a very young age. He used to bring me to the office; he would make me sit down in the meetings and listen to everything that was going on—the issues, the problems and a lot of the decisions being made. Later on, privately, he would explain to me why those problems were happening and why those decisions were made. So, that kind of always excited me—you know, to understand his way of thinking and the way he dealt with real-time problems. He got me hooked to cars at a very young age; he always drove nice cars and I was always attracted to cars, since I couldn’t even look beyond the dashboard. So, that’s something that got me into the business very early on.
SB: You were instrumental in the group’s acquisition of Visiocorp in March 2009. What has your experience been like since then?
LVS: We have 25 partners and more than 50 joint venture companies, and we’ve had a long association with a lot of these partners. They come from all over the world—Japan, Australia, China, Korea and Italy. So we have multiple partnerships, which have been taken on with a long-term perspective; they are not something we enter into for the short term. With a philosophy that we have from our first joint venture partner and our respected teacher, Sumitomo Wiring Systems, we have learned that we must continuously invest in our processes and R&D. With the acquisition of the new company, SMR, we have inherited more than 300 patents and new technologies; we are going to put these into the mirrors and supply them to customers. So that is something we need to continuously invest in to stay ahead of the game—to develop new, game-changing technologies in this industry.
SB: You have also helped take the group from a single product, single location company to a business with 80 offices globally and manufacturing units spread across 21 countries. In addition, you have sourced technology from Japan and Germany for the company. Today, Samvardhana Motherson Group provides end-to-end services—from product design and prototyping to tool design and manufacturing. Last year, however, was not a great year for the auto sector. What’s your take on it?LVS: There couldn’t be a better time for me to step in, because I couldn’t have done any worse than what was already happening in the market. So I think it helped me, coming into a [situation] where things were really wrong and everything was shaking. It was a bit strange to [experience] that, actually, after the growth we had seen in the last few years. But it kind of put a sense of reality into the situation. When you come into a crisis, the situation brings out the best in you to figure out what you need to do to set things back on track again. That’s something that really helped me realize that not everything is green and looks good on the other side of the fence—you really have serious problems in the industry that need to be tackled head on.
SB: What is your vision for the company? Are there any plans for more acquisitions?
LVS: Starting out as a single product wire harness manufacturer, we have transformed into a diversified automotive system supplier. Our vision is to be a globally preferred full-system solution provider.
©Entrepreneur February 2010