In a far cry from the Modi businesses of the past, the current structure is service-oriented, with Modi seeming visibly enamoured of technology and the new generation. And he’s ready to put his money where his mouth is— Rs 300 crore in entertainment, Rs 200 crore in telecom and in finance where the group will be a ‘special-situation’ investor, Rs 500 crore has been set aside as the initial corpus.
For the special-situation fund— which will operate more or less like a private equity player—Modi has sealed a joint venture asset management firm with Three Degree Asset Management of Singapore. “We are starting as a proprietary fund, but we will have third party investors soon. Also, we have a lot of arrangements in place with banks, which will step in with funds for specific investment opportunities that they may like; they can hold shares directly in these companies along with us,” explains Divya. A non-banking finance company called Spice Bulls has also been flagged off.
{mosimage}On the telecom front, Dilip has been a part of the Modi telecom sojourn ever since Modi Telstra bagged the Kolkata metro licence in an auction in 1994; the group also had the honour of connecting the first mobile phone call in India between then West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu and then Union Minister for Telecommunications Sukh Ram in 1995. It had also set up the first mobile telephony equipment manufacturing unit with Alcatel. Along with telecom retail, Dilip is looking to back innovations by start-ups. “Spice Labs will work on new technologies and I-Cube will fund innovations. In fact, I-Cube, which has a core team in place, is evaluating four business plans right now,” says Dilip.
The Modis are not one to lose out on a bullish spell. They are keen to list Spice Televentures on the stock markets. The company is hoping to ride on a Rs 2,000 crore top line, and garner an attractive valuation. Will investors bite? Says V.K. Sharma, Head (Research), Anagram Stockbroking: “The market is now ripe for IPOs. The recent upward movement has created space for IPOs. However, the perception of the investing community about this group is nothing great.”
Will Modi stick to the current framework? A recent attempt at opportunistic inorganic growth, to acquire Satyam, didn’t work out; neither did a bid for VSNL when it was thrown up for disinvestment in the early 2000s. Modi doesn’t rule out more such attempts as long as they fit in the current scheme of things. He also has something he didn’t for a long time—his own brand, called S. “Earlier, we didn’t focus on creating our own brands (with reference to joint ventures like Modi Xerox, Modi Olivetti and Modi Telstra). We now have a digital brand that we can even take abroad and localise. It’s like a window (to the world),” points out Modi. It’s up to Dilip and Divya to ensure that window stays open for some time to come