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25 November, 2014

Sensex @28,500 : Stock Market as a beauty contest

Vivek Kaul

We never know what we are talking about – Karl Popper

The Sensex closed at 28,499.54 points yesterday (i.e. November 24, 2014). The fund managers are confident that this bull run will last for a while. Or so they said in a round table organised by The Economic Times.
Prashant Jain of HDFC Mutual Fund explained that during the last three bull markets that India had seen, the market had never peaked before reaching a price to earnings ratio of 25 times. The price to earnings ratio currently is 16 times, and hence, we are still at a “reasonable distance” from the peak.
This seems like a fair point. But how many people invest in the stock market on the basis of where the price to earnings ratio is at any point of time? If that were the case most people would have invested in 2008-2009, when the price to earnings ratio of the Sensex through the year stood at 12.68.
By buying stocks at a lower price to earnings ratio, they would have made more money once the stock market started to recover. But stock markets and rationality don’t always go together. Every investor is does not look at fundamentals before investing. “In investing, fundamentals are the underlying realities of business, in terms of sales, costs and profits,” explains John Lanchester in How to Speak Money.
A big bunch of stock market investors like to move with the herd. Let’s call such investors non fundamentals investors.
So when do these investors actually invest in the stock market? In order to understand this we will have to go back to John Maynard Keynes. Keynes equated the stock market to a “beauty contest” which was fairly common during his day.
As Lanchester writes “Keynes gave a famous description of what this kind of non-fundamentals investor does: he is looking at a photo of six girls and trying to pick, not which girl he thinks is the prettiest, and not which he thinks most people will think is the prettiest, but which most people will think most people will think is the prettiest…In other words the non-fundamentals investor isn’t trying to work out what companies he should invest in, or what company most investors will think they should invest in, but which company most investors will think most investors will want to invest in.”
Or as Keynes put it in his magnum opus The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money“It is not a case of choosing those [faces] that, to the best of one’s judgement, are really the prettiest, nor even those that average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.”
Hence, a large bunch of investors invest on the basis of whether others round them have been investing. That is the beauty contest of today.
Nilesh Shah, MD and CEO of Axis Capital pointed out in The Economic Times round table that nearly Rs 25,000-Rs 30,000 crore of money will come into the stock market through systematic investment plans (SIPs).
Anyone who understands the basics of how SIPs work knows that they are designed to exploit the volatility of the stock market—buy more mutual fund units when the stock market is falling and buy fewer units while it is going up. This helps in averaging the cost of purchase over a period of time, and ensures reasonable returns.
Investors who are getting into SIPs now are not best placed to exploit the SIP design. Nevertheless, they are still investing simply because others around them have been investing. This also explains why the net inflow into equity mutual funds for the first seven months of the this financial year (between April and October 2014) has been at Rs 39,217 crore. This is when the stock market is regularly touching new highs.
And if things go on as they currently are, the year might see the highest inflow into equity mutual funds ever. The year 2007-2008 had seen Rs 40,782 crore being invested into equity mutual funds. This was the year when the stock market was on fire. In early January 2008, the Sensex almost touched 21,000 points. It had started the financial year at around 12,500 points.
So, now its all about the flow or what Keynes said “what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.” And till people see others around them investing in the stock market they will continue to do so. This will happen till the stock market continues to rise. And stock market will continue to rise till foreign investors keep bringing money into India.
No self respecting fund manager can admit to the fact that these are the reasons behind the stock market rallying continuously all through this year. This is simply because all fund managers charge a certain percentage of the money they manage as a management fee.
And how will they justify that management fee, if the stock market is going up simply because it is going up. Nobel prize winning economist Robert Shiller calls such a situation a naturally occurring Ponzi scheme.
As he writes in the first edition of Irrational Exuberance: “Ponzi schemes do arise from time to time without the contrivance of a fraudulent manager. Even if there is no manipulator fabricating false stories and deliberately deceiving investors in the aggregate stock market, tales about the market are everywhere. When prices go up a number of times, investors are rewarded sequentially by price movements in these markets just as they are in Ponzi schemes. There are still many people (indeed, the stock brokerage and mutual fund industries as a whole) who benefit from telling stories that suggest that the markets will go up further. There is no reason for these stories to be fraudulent; they need to only emphasize the positive news and give less emphasis to the negative.”
And that is precisely what fund managers will do in the time to come. In fact, they have already started to do that.
They will tell us stories. One favourite story that they like to offer is that India’s economy is much better placed than a lot of other emerging markets. This is true, but then what does that really tell us? (For a real picture of the Indian economy check out this piece by Swaminathan Aiyar).
Another favourite line you will hear over and over again is that “markets are never wrong”. This phrase can justify anything.
The trick here is to say things with confidence. And that is something some of these fund managers excel at. Nevertheless it is worth remembering what Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in The Black Swan: “Humans will believe anything you say provided you do not exhibit the smallest shadow of diffidence; like animals, they can detect the smallest crack in your confidence before you express it. The trick is to be smooth as possible in personal manners…It is not what you are telling people, it how you are saying it.”
And this is something worth thinking about.

The article originally appeared on www.equitymaster.com on Nov 25, 2014

24 November, 2014

Kotak-ING Vysya merger: Why M&As are like Elizabeth Taylor’s marriages

Kotak Mahindra Bank is set to acquire ING Vysya bank. “All ING Vysya branches and employees will become Kotak branches and employees” after the deal is completed,” the banks said in a statement yesterday. “Congratulations @udaykotak on a brilliant merger move. The enormous synergies are obvious,” industrialist Anand Mahindra tweeted after the deal was announced.
Big companies like to acquire other companies and the reason that is often cited is synergy. But things are never very obvious, even though they may seem to be initially. The history of mergers and acquisitions is littered with examples of things going terribly wrong for companies. Nevertheless, the zeal to merge and acquire, and thus grow bigger in the process, doesn’t seem to die down with executives who always remain confident of making it work.
As Paul B Carrol and Chunka Mui write in Billion Dollar Lessons — What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failure of the Last 25 Years “Executives can be like Elizabeth Taylor, who has said that with each of eight marriages, she was convinced that somehow, someway, this marriage would work.”
Usually a merger is justified by harping on a particular synergy. And what exactly is this synergy? It could be something like the scenario that was used to justify Coca Cola buying Columbia Pictures—consumers while watching movies made by Columbia Pictures will drink Coke. Not surprisingly, this did not work out well and Coca Cola had to soon sell Columbia Pictures.
But on a more serious note what exactly is synergy? John Lanchester defines the term in his book How To Speak Money: “Synergy: Mainly BULLSHIT, but when it does mean anything it means merging two companies together and taking the opportunity to sack people.” He then goes on to explain the concept through an example.
As he writes “If two companies that make similar products merge, they will have a similar warehouse and delivery operations, so one of the two sets of employees will lose their jobs. The idea is that this will cut COSTS and increase profits, though that tends not to happen, and it is a proven fact that most mergers end by costing money…When two companies merge, the first thing that ANALYSTS look at when evaluating the deal is how many jobs have been lost: the higher the number, the better. That’s synergy.”
An interesting story here is that of Bank of America stepping into acquire Merrill Lynch around the time the current financial crisis broke out. Michael Lewis writes in Flashboys that Merrill Lynch ended up taking over the equity division of Bank of America and went about firing employees of the bank. Merrill Lynch employees also gave themselves huge bonuses. Lewis quotes John Schwall, who had for Bank of America for nine years, as saying: “It was incredibly unjust. My stock in this company I helped build for nine years goes into the shitter, and these assholes pay themselves record bonuses. It was a fucking crime.”
Also, even in cases of firms which are in the same line of business, things can turn out all wrong, even with all the projected synergy. As an article in a September 1994 edition of The Economist points out “Even complementary firms can have different cultures, which makes melding them tricky. And organising an acquisition can make top managers spread their time too thinly, neglecting their core business and so bringing doom. Too often, however, potential difficulties such as these seem trivial to managers caught up in the thrill of the chase…and eager to grow more powerful.” This is something that Kotak and ING Vysya will have to deal with. Essentially, what might seem like an extremely valuable operating synergy may simply evaporate because of the cultural differences that exist between the two firms.
A good example here is the merger of America Online and Time Warner. “At the time of the merger in 2000, when the company’s market capitalisation was $280 billion, AOL’s Steve Case and Time Warner’s Gerald Levin proclaimed that they had done nothing less than reinvent media by combining an old-line media company with a new age one. They said AOL would feed customers to Time Warner’s magazines and its cable, movie, music, and book businesses. Time Warner would provide new kinds of content that would help AOL sign up even more customers for its online subscription service,” write Carrol and Mui.
But the synergy that had been thought of before the merger was simply not there. And there was a reason for it. The idea was to combine the “old and new media”. The top management did a lot to get the synergy going. Nevertheless it did not work out. As Carol and Mul put it “But the folks on the Time Warner side, in particular, didn’t make the jump with them. Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated and scores of other magazines had prospered for decades. They had well-established practices for how they produced their stories and sold their ads.”
And once these so called obvious synergies evaporate, there is trouble ahead. Hence, most mergers and acquisitions do not work out well. As Carrol and Mui point out “A McKinsey study of 124 mergers found that only 30% generated synergies on the revenue side that were even close to what the acquirer had predicted. Results were better on the cost side. Some 60% of the cases met the forecasts on cost synergies. Still, that means two out of five didn’t deliver the cost synergies, and forecasts were sometimes way off — in a quarter of the cases, cost synergies were overestimated by at least 25%.”
There is other similar evidence available. As Jay Niblick writes in an article titled The Problem with Mergers and Acquisitions “According to KPMG and Wharton studies, 83% of mergers and acquisitions failed to produce any benefits – and over half actually ended up reducing the value instead of increasing it. Multiple other studies would agree, finding that the failure rate of most mergers and acquisitions ranges somewhere between 60-80%. It would seem obvious that something is wrong with this industry.”
Niblick goes on to ask “even the average village idiot should be able to notice that something isn’t working here – right?” But that as it turns out is not the case.
Even with a huge amount of evidence that mergers and acquisitions don’t seem to work, the idea of acquiring companies is seductive. This is primarily because “they fill the need for CEOs to make some bold move that will redefine an industry and establish their legacy,” explain Carol and Mui This leads to the acquiring company typically overpaying for the acquired firm and shareholders of the acquired firm lose out in the process. As The Economist points out “Shareholders of acquiring firms seldom do well: on average their share price is roughly unchanged on the news of the deal, and then falls relative to the market. Part of the reason for this is that lovelorn company bosses, intent on conquest, neglect the needs of their existing shareholders.”
To conclude, the top management of Kotak and ING will have to keep these things in mind once they start merging their operations on the ground. And if history is any guide for things, tough times lie ahead for the two financial firms.

The article originally appeared on www.FirstBiz.com on Nov 21, 2014

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

21 November, 2014

What Arun Jaitley can learn from marketers and real estate agents

Vivek Kaul

I need to confess at the very start that I should have written this column a few days back. But more important things happened and this idea had to take a back seat. Nevertheless, as they say, it’s better late than never.
So, let’s start this column with two examples—one borrowed and one personal. The idea behind both the examples is to illustrate two concepts from behavioural economics—contrast effect and anchoring.
In the book The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, Barry Schwartz discusses an example of a high-end catalog seller, who was selling an automatic bread maker for $279. As he writes “Sometime later, the catalog seller began to offer a large capacity, deluxe version for $429. They didn’t sell too many of these expensive bread makers, but sales of the less expensive one almost doubled! With the expensive bread maker serving as anchor, the $279 machine had become a bargain.”
Essentially, there are two things that are happening here. The buyer first gets “anchored” on to high price of the deluxe version of bread maker which is priced at $429. After this the contrast effect takes over. The bread maker priced at $279 seems cheaper than the deluxe version and people end up buying it.
As John Allen Paulos writes in A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market “Most of us suffer from a common psychological failing. We credit and easily become attached to any number we hear. This tendency is called “anchoring effect.””
And once an individual is anchored on to a number, he then tends to compare it with other numbers that are thrown at him. Marketers exploit this very well. As Schwartz points out “When we see outdoor gas grills on the market for $8,000, it seems quite reasonable to buy one for $1,200. When a wristwatch that is no more accurate than one you can buy for $50 sells for $20,000, it seems reasonable to buy one for $2,000. Even if companies sell almost none of their highest-priced models, they can reap enormous benefits from producing such models because they help induce people to buy cheaper ( but still extremely expensive) ones.”
This was the borrowed example. Now let me discuss the personal example. Sometime in May 2006, I was suddenly asked to leave the apartment that I lived in because the landlord had not been paying the society charges for a very long time. And thus started the search for another apartment to rent. Affordable apartments in Central Mumbai tend to be in buildings that are not in best shape.
Given this, real estate agents use a trick where they try and exploit the contrast effect. The first few apartments that they show are in a really bad shape. After having done this they show an apartment which is slightly better than the ones shown earlier, but the rent is significantly higher.
The attractiveness of the apartment shown later is increased significantly by showing a few “run down” apartments earlier.
The idea behind sharing these two examples was to explain the idea of anchoring and contrast effect. I hope both these concepts are clear by now. Now let me move on to real issue that I want to talk about in this column.
On November 18, the finance minister Arun Jaitley said in a speech “Inflation, especially food inflation, has moderated in the last few months and global fuel prices have also come down. Therefore, if RBI, which is a highly professional organisation, in its wisdom decides to bring down the cost of capital, it will give a good fillip to the Indian economy.”
In simple English, Jaitley, as he has often done in the past, was asking the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to cut the repo rate. Repo rate is the interest rate at which RBI lends to banks. The idea is essentially that at lower interest rates, people will borrow and spend more, and companies will invest and expand. This will lead to faster economic growth. While this sounds good in theory, as I had argued a few days back, it isn’t as simple it is made out to be.
One argument offered by those asking the RBI to cut interest rates is that inflation as measured by the consumer price index has fallen to 5.52% in October 2014. It was at 6.46 % in September 2014 and 10.17% in October 2013.
Nevertheless, is inflation really low? Or are Jaitley and others like him who have been demanding an interest rate cut just becoming victims of anchoring and the contrast effect?
The inflation figure of greater than 10% which had been prevalent over the last few years is anchored into their minds. And in comparison to that an inflation of 5.52% does sound low. Hence, the contrast effect is at work here.
Further, it is worth remembering that this so called low inflation has been prevalent only for a few months. Chances are that food prices might start rising again. The government has forecast that the output of kharif crops will be much lower than last year and this might start pushing food prices upwards all over again. Also, recent data showsthat vegetable and cereal prices have started rising again because of the delayed monsoon.
Central banks of developed countries typically tend to have an inflation target of 2%. In the recent past they have been unable to meet even that number. Large parts of the world might now be heading towards deflationary scenario, where prices will fall.
In October, the consumer price inflation in China stood at 1.6%, well below the targeted 3.5%. Also, in January earlier this year the Report of the Expert Committee to Revise and Strengthen the Monetary Policy Framework set up by RBI had recommended that the Indian central bank should set an inflation target of 4%, with a band of +/- 2 per cent around it .
The committee had said “transition path to the target zone should be graduated to bringing down inﬂation from the current level of 10 per cent to 8 per cent over a period not exceeding the next 12 months and 6 per cent over a period not exceeding the next 24 month period before formally adopting the recommended target of 4 per cent inﬂation with a band of +/- 2 per cent.”
Once, these factors are taken into account, the latest inflation number of 5.52% as measured by the consumer price index, isn’t really low, even though it seems to be low in comparison to the very high inflation that had prevailed earlier. But as explained this is more because of anchoring and the contrast effect at work.
Also, as I had written earlier, more than anything people still haven’t come around to the idea of low inflation, given that inflationary expectations(or the expectations that consumers have of what future inflation is likely to be) continue to remain on the high side.
As per the Reserve Bank of India’s Inflation Expectations Survey of Households: September – 2014, the inflationary expectations over the next three months and one year are at 14.6 percent and 16 percent. In March 2014, the numbers were at 12.9 percent and 15.3 percent. Hence, inflationary expectations have risen since the beginning of this financial year.
If inflationary expectations are to come down, then low inflation needs to be prevail for some time. Just a few months of low inflation is not enough. As RBI governor Raghuram Rajan had said in a speech in February this year “ the best way for the central bank to generate growth in the long run is for it to bring down inflation…Put differently, in order to generate sustainable growth, we have to fight inflation first.”
Rajan is trying to do just that, and it’s best that Jaitley allows him to do that, instead of demanding a cut in interest rates every now and then.

The article appeared originally on www.equitymaster.com on Nov 21, 2014

19 November, 2014

Yen carry trade from Japan will drive the Sensex higher

Vivek Kaul

John Brooks in his brilliant book Business Adventures writes “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions!” One country on which this sentence applies the most is Japan. The country has been trying to come out of a bad economic scenario for two decades and it only keeps getting worse for them, despite the effort of its politicians and its central bank.
In the previous column, I wrote about how the prevailing economic scenario in Japan will ensure that they will continue with the “easy money” policy in the days to come, by printing money and maintaining low interest rates in the process.
But it looks like the situation just got worse for them. The Japanese economy contracted at an annual rate of 1.6% during the period July-September 2014. This after having contracted at an annual rate of 7.1% in April-June 2014. Two consecutive quarters of economic contraction constitute a recession.
Shinzo Abe was elected the prime minister of Japan in December 2012. His immediate priority was to create some inflation in Japan in order to get consumer spending going again. The Bank of Japan cooperated with Abe on this, and decided to print as much money as would be required to get inflation to 2%. This policy came to be referred as “Abenomics”.
In April 2013, the Bank of Japan decided to print $1.4 trillion and use it to buy bonds, and hence, pump that money into the financial system. The size of the Japanese economy is around $5 trillion. Hence, as a proportion of the size of Japan’s economy, this money printing effort was twice the size of the Federal Reserve’s third round of money printing, more commonly referred to as the third round of quantitative easing or QE-III.
Sometime in April this year, the Abe government decided to increase the sales tax from 5% to 8%. The idea again was to raise prices, by introducing a tax, and get people to start spending again. Nevertheless, this backfired big time and the economy has now contracted for two consecutive quarters. Elaine Kurtenbach writing for the Huffington Post points out “Housing investment plunged 24 percent from the same quarter a year ago, while corporate capital investment sank 0.9 percent. Consumer spending, which accounts for about two-thirds of the economy, edged up just 0.4 percent.”
Towards the end of October 2014, the Bank of Japan decided to print $800 billion more because the inflation wasn’t rising as the central bank expected it to. Now with the economy contracting again, there will be calls for more money printing and economic stimulus. In fact, after GDP contraction number came out, Etsuro Honda, an architect of Abenomics, told the Wall Street Journal that it was “absolutely necessary to take countermeasures.”
While the “easy money” policy run by the Japanese government and the central bank hasn’t managed to create much inflation, it has led to the depreciation of the yen against the dollar and other currencies.
In early November 2012, before Shinzo Abe took over as the prime minister of Japan, one dollar was worth 79.4 yen. Since then, the yen has constantly fallen against the dollar and as I write this on the evening of November 18, it is worth around 117 to a dollar.
Interestingly, some inflation that has been created is primarily because of yen losing value against the dollar. This has made imports expensive. The consumer price inflation(excluding fresh foods) for the month of September 2014 came in at 3%. Once adjusted for the sales tax increase in April, this number fell to a six month low of 1%, still much below the Bank of Japan’s targeted 2% inflation.
Analysts believe that the yen will keep losing value against the dollar in the time to come. John Mauldin wrote in a recent column titled The Last Argument of Central Bankers “The yen is already down 40% in buying power against a number of currencies, and another 40-50% reduction in buying power in the coming years is likely, in my opinion.”
Albert Edwards of Societe Generale is a little more direct than Mauldin and wrote in a recent research report titled Forecast timidity prevents anyone forecasting ¥145/$ by end March – so I will “The yen is set to…[crash] through multi-decade resistance – around ¥120. It seems entirely plausible to me that once we break ¥120, we could see a very quick ¥25 move to ¥145 [by March 2015].”
Edwards further writes that he expects “the key ¥120/$ support level to be broken soon and the lows of June 2007 (¥124) and Feb 2002 (¥135) to be rapidly taken out.” The note was written before the information that the Japanese economy had contracted during July-September 2014, came in.
This makes the Japanese yen a perfect currency for a “carry trade”. It can be borrowed at a very low rate of interest and is depreciating against the dollar. Before we go any further, it is important that we go back to the Japan of early 1990s.
The Bank of Japan had managed to burst bubbles in the Japanese stock and real estate market, by raising interest rates. This brought the economic growth to a standstill.
After bursting the bubbles by raising interest rates, the Bank of Japan had to start cutting interest rates and soon the rates were close to 0 percent. This meant that anyone looking to save money by investing in fixed-income investments (i.e., bonds or bank deposits) in Japan would have made next to nothing.
This led to the Japanese looking for returns outside Japan. Some housewife traders started staying up at night to trade in the European and the North American financial markets. They borrowed money in yen at very low interest rates, converted it into foreign currencies and invested in bonds and other fixed-income instruments giving higher rates of returns than what was available in Japan.
Over a period of time, these housewives came to be known as Mrs Watanabes and, at their peak, accounted for around 30 percent of the foreign exchange market in Tokyo, writes Satyajit Das in Extreme Money.
The trading strategy of the Mrs Watanabes came to be known as the yen-carry trade and was soon being adopted by some of the biggest financial institutions in the world. A lot of the money that came into the United States during the dot-com bubble came through the yen-carry trade.
It was called the carry trade because investors made the carry, that is, the difference between the returns they made on their investment (in bonds, or even in stocks, for that matter) and the interest they paid on their borrowings in yen.
The strategy worked as long as the yen did not appreciate against other currencies, primarily the US dollar. Let’s try and understand this in some detail. In January 1995, one dollar was worth around 100 yen. At this point of time one Mrs Watanabe decided to invest one million yen in a dollar-denominated asset paying a fixed interest rate of 5 percent per year.
She borrowed this money in yen at the rate of 1 percent per year. The first thing she needed to do was to convert her yen into dollars. At $1 = 100 yen, she got $10,000 for her million yen, assuming for the ease of calculating that there was no costs of conversion.
This was invested at an interest rate of 5%. At the end of one year, in January 1996, $10,000 had grown to $10,500. Mrs Watanabe decided to convert this money back into yen. At that point, one dollar was worth 106 yen.
She got around 1.11 million yen ($10,500 × 106) or a return of 11 percent. She also needed to pay the interest of 1 percent on the borrowed money. Hence, her overall return was 10 percent. Her 5 percent return in dollar terms had been converted into a 10 percent return in yen terms because the yen had lost value against the dollar.
But let’s say that instead of depreciating against the dollar, as the yen actually did, it instead appreciated. Let’s further assume that in January 1996 one dollar was worth 95.5 yen. At this rate, the $10,500 that Mrs Watanabe got at the end of the year would have been worth 1 million yen ($10,500 × 95.5) when converted back into yen.
Hence, Mrs Watanabe would have ended up with the same amount that she had started with. This would have meant an overall loss, given that she had to pay an interest of 1 percent on the money she had borrowed in yen.
The point is that the return on the carry trade starts to go down when the currency in which the money has been borrowed, starts to appreciate. Since its beginnings in the mid-1990s, the yen carry trade worked in most years up to mid-2007. In June 2007, one dollar was worth 122.6 yen on an average. After this, the value of the yen against the dollar started to go up over the next few years.
With the yen expected to depreciate further against the dollar, it will lead to big institutional investors increasing their yen carry trades in the days to come. This will mean money will be borrowed in yen, and invested in financial markets all over the world.
Some of this money will find its way into the stock and the bond market in India. Moral of the story: The easy money rally is set to continue. The only question is till when?
Stay tuned!

The article originally appeared on www.equitymaster.com on Nov 19, 2014

18 November, 2014

Bill Gates’ favourite business book tells us why Tata Nano “really” failed

Vivek Kaul

In July this year Bill Gates wrote a blog. He titled it The Best Business Book I’ve Ever Read. As he wrote “Not long after I first met Warren Buffett back in 1991, I asked him to recommend his favorite book about business. He didn’t miss a beat: “It’s Business Adventures, by John Brooks,” he said. “I’ll send you my copy.” I was intrigued: I had never heard of Business Adventures or John Brooks.” Gates got a copy of the book from Buffett. “Today, more than two decades after Warren lent it to me—and more than four decades after it was first published—Business Adventures remains the best business book I’ve ever read. John Brooks is still my favorite business writer. (And Warren, if you’re reading this, I still have your copy),” Gates added. The book is essentially a collection of 12 long articles (I don’t know what else to call them) that Brooks wrote for the New Yorker magazine, where he used to work. A chapter that should be of interest to Indian readers is The Fate of Edsel. A reading of this chapter clearly tells us why Tata Nano, the most hyped Indian car ever, has failed to live up to its hype. But before we get to that, here is a brief summary of the chapter. In 1955, the Ford Motor Company decided to produce a new car, which would be priced in the medium range of $2,400 to $4,000. The car was designed more or less as was the fashion of the day. It was long, wide, lavishly decorated with chrome, had a lot of gadgets and was equipped with engines which could really rustle up some serious power. The car was called the Edsel. It was named after Edsel Ford, the only son of Henry Ford who started the Ford Motor Company. In 1943, Edsel Ford had died at a young age of 49, of stomach cancer. In fact, even before the Edsel car was launched there was a lot of hype around it. As Brooks writes “In September 1957, the Ford Company put its new car, the Edsel, on the market, to the accompaniment of more fanfare than had attended the arrival of any other new car since the same company’s Model A. A model brought out thirty years earlier.” The company had already spent $250 million on the car, before it was launched. The Business Week called it more costly than any other consumer product in history. Given this huge cost, Ford had to sell around 200,000 Edsels in the first year, if it had to get its investment back. Nevertheless, two years, two months and fifteen days later, it had only sold 109,446 Edsels. This included cars bought by Ford executives, dealers, salesman, workers etc. The number amounted to less than 1% of the cars sold in America during that period. On November 19, 1959, it pulled the plug on the car. Estimates suggested that Ford lost around $350 million on the car. So what went wrong? Some of the feedback from trade publications was negative. Over and above that, some of the cars that were sent out initially were badly made. As Brooks writes “Automotive News reported that in general the earliest Edsels suffered from poor paint, inferior sheet metal, and faulty accessories, and quoted the lament of a dealer about one of the first Edsel convertibles he received: “The top was badly set, doors cockeyed, springs sagged.”” Some individuals who worked on making and launching the car liked to believe in later that it was the because of the Sputnik, the first artificial space satellite launched by the Soviets that led to the car not selling. As Brooks puts it “October 4th[1957], the day the first Soviet Sputnik went into orbit, shattering the myth of American technical pre-eminence and precipitating a public revulsion against Detroit’s fancier baubles.” Detroit was the city were the biggest motor companies in the United States were head-quartered back then. While these could have been reasons for the car not selling, the real reason for the car not selling was the hype that accompanied it. As Brooks writes “It was agreed that the safest way to tread the tightrope between overplaying and underplaying the Edsel would be to say nothing about the car as a whole but to reveal its individual charms a little at a time—a sort of automotive strip tease…The Ford Company had built up an overwhelming head of public interest in the Edsel, causing its arrival to be anticipated and the car itself to be gawked at with more eagerness than had ever greeted any automobile before it.” C Gayle Warnock, director of public relations of the Edsel division of Ford, shares an interesting example, which provides the real reason behind the failure of the Edsel car. In 1956, a senior official working on the Edsel launch (in fact it wasn’t called the Edsel then, it was just the E-Car) gave a talk about it in Portland, Oregon. Warnock was aiming for some coverage regarding the event in the local press. But what he got was something he had not expected. The story got picked up by wire services and was splashed all across the country. As Warnock recounts in the chapter “Clippings [of the media coverage] came in by the bushel. Right then I realized the trouble we might be headed for. The public was getting to be hysterical to see our car, figuring it was going to be some kind of dream car—like nothing they’d ever seen. I said… “When they find out it’s got four wheels and one engine, just like the next car, they’re liable to be disappointed.”” And this is precisely the reason why the Edsel flopped. The hype was so much that the public expected something that was totally out of the world. But what Ford was basically giving them in the rephrased words of Larry Doyle, the head of sales at the Edsel division, “exactly the car that they had been buying for several years.” As Doyle put it “We gave it to them and they couldn’t take it.” Further, it did not help that the first lot of cars was not properly manufactured. “Within a few weeks after the Edsel was introduced, its pitfalls were the talk of the land,” writes Brooks. Now replace the word Edsel with Nano and the situation stays more or less the same. The hype around the car was huge. When the car was launched in 2009, the entire world media was in Delhi for the launch. In fact, before the car was launched the rating agency Crisil said that the car could expand the Indian car market by 65%. People who had cars were already worried about the traffic on the roads getting worse than it already was, because of the Nano. Before the car was launched in 2009, prices in the used car market fell by 25-30%, given Nano’s expected price point of Rs 1 lakh. Nonetheless, Nano could not live up to the hype. In a May 2014 newsreport, the Business Standard pointed out that “Launched in 2009,Nano sales between 2010-11 and 2012-13 constituted 23-24 per cent of Tata Motors’ total sales. But Nano sales declined dramatically after peaking to 74,527 in 2011-12. The numbers came down by more than 70 per cent in two years to 21,129 in 2013-14. Tata Motors has set up a facility at Sanand in Gujarat to make 250,000 Nanos a year.” So, the car sold nowhere near the numbers it was expected to. What did not help was that when the car actually started hitting the market in 2010, some units caught fire. After all the hoopla around the Nano, this wasn’t what the public was ready to accept. Brooks’ sentence written for Edsel can be re-written for Nano as well: “After the Nano was introduced, its pitfalls were the talk of the land.” Further, the hype around the car was so huge that the people were expecting something totally out of this world. They did not know what they wanted, but they did not want, what they got. The question that remains is how much could you expect out of a car which was supposed to be sold at Rs 1 lakh? The article originally appeared on www.FirstBiz.com on Nov 18, 2014

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)