The Indian Hustler

Ramalinga_Raju_at_the_2008_Indian_Economic_SummitVivek Kaul

At the heart of it most scams are very simple—Satyam was no different. Sometime in 2003, B Ramalinga Raju, the founder and chairman of Satyam Computer Services started over-declaring revenues of the company. The process continued till 2008. On January 7, 2009, Raju in a letter to the board of directors of the company admitted to fudging the accounts of Satyam.
Between 2003 and 2008, Raju over-declared revenues of the company by creating fictitious clients. Once he had over-declared revenues he automatically ended up over-declaring profits. Over-declared profits had to be invested somewhere. This led to the creation of fictitious bank statements and fixed deposit receipts. With a rapid advancement in the quality of colour printers, creating fictitious bank statements wouldn’t have been very difficult.
In his letter to the board, Raju admitted that the cash and bank balances were hugely overstated. The cash and bank balances of the company as on September 30, 2008(the last time the company declared quarterly results) were at Rs 5,313 crore. Th actual number was at a much lower Rs 273 crore. More than half a decade of declaring fictitious profits had led to a massive jump in the cash and bank balances of the company. But the number, like the profits of the company, was fictitious.
The company was guzzling whatever “real” cash it had at a very fast rate. By the time January 2009 started, the company’s actual cash and bank balance of the company would have been much lower than Rs 273 crore.
One of the theories put forward after Raju admitted to all the wrongdoings in the letter was that only when he realized that the company wouldn’t have enough money to keep paying salaries to its employees did he decide to come out with the truth. As Raju said in his letter: “The company had to carry additional resources and assets to justify higher level of operations…It was like riding a tiger, not knowing how to get off without being eaten.”
The irony is that Raju had to get off the tiger, and he still hasn’t been eaten. Like all big businessmen in India, Raju is also a survivor. A special court in Hyderabad has found him and nine others guilty of cheating, criminal breach of trust, destruction of evidence and forgery. The court pronounced a seven year-jail term for the founder and also imposed a Rs 5 crore fine on him.
It took the judicial system six years and three months to sentence Raju. And this is not the end of it. The decision will be challenged in higher courts and the process will continue for a while.
The question I want to explore in this column is the timing of Raju’s confession. Raju sent a tell-all letter to the Satyam Board in January 2009. Why didn’t he do the same in January 2008? Or even earlier, for that matter, is a question worth asking.
The probable reason is that Raju was confident enough of pulling off the scam till he wasn’t. And why is that? It is worth remembering that between 2003 and 2008, the stock market in India had a huge bull run. The economy was also booming. And in such a scenario, when the financial system is flush with money, it is easy to keep a scam going.
As economic historian Charles Kindleberger writes in
Manias, Panics and Crashes: “The propensities to swindle and be swindled run parallel to the propensity to speculate during a boom.” This precisely what Ramalinga Raju was busy doing.
The stock market started crashing from early 2008, due the advent of what we now call the global financial crisis. And because of this, money wasn’t as easy to raise as was the case earlier. Raju tried to plug the huge gap in Satyam’s balance sheet by buying out two real estate firms Maytas Properties and Maytras Infra. Both these firms were owned by his family (Maytas is the opposite of Satyam).
But by late 2008, an era of easy money had come to an end. And sham transactions were not as easy to pull through. The idea here was to use Satyam’s fake cash and bank balances to buy out the real estate firms and thus have “real” assets on the balance sheet. As Raju wrote in the letter: “ The aborted Maytas acquisition deal was the last attempt to fill the fictitious assets with real ones…Once Satyam’s problem was solved, it was hoped that Maytas’ payments can be delayed.” But this deal fell through after the independent directors on the Satyam board raised issues about an IT company taking over real estate assets. In fact, if Raju had tried to push this deal through a year earlier, chances are that the board might have agreed, given that the going was good at that point of time. And when the going is good no one wants to spoil the party by asking inconvenient questions.
As the economist John Kenneth Galbraith writes in
The Great Crash 1929: “At any given time there exists an inventory of undisclosed embezzlement. This inventory – it should perhaps be called the bezzle – amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars. In good times people are relaxed ,trusting, and money is plentiful. … Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression all this is reversed. … Just as the (stock market boom) accelerated the rate of growth (of embezzlement), so the crash enormously advanced the rate of discovery.”
Interestingly, the Satyam scam was the first of many scams that were to hit the nation starting in 2009. It was followed by the 2G, Commonwealth games and the coalgate scam. Sahara, Saradha, Rose Valley and many other big Ponzi schemes came to light. The National Spot Exchange scam came to light as well. These scams were mostly executed during the period between 2003 and 2008, when the economy was doing well and the stock market was going from strength to strength, but they were only revealed after the good days came to a stop.
In that sense Raju set the trend of things to come. We have to give him credit for at least that.

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

The article originally appeared in the Daily News and Analysis on April 12, 2015

Biyani, Mallya, Suzlon, DLF: Easy money screwed up India Inc


Vivek Kaul
George Orwell the author of masterpieces like 1984 and Animal Farm once said “whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible”. The big Indian businessmen went through this phase between 2003 and 2008. They were invincible and the world seemed to be at their feet.
One impact of this was diversification or entrepreneurs following the age old adage of not having all the eggs in one basket. And so the Indian entrepreneurs went on a diversification spree. Vijay Mallya thought running an airline, a cricket team and an FI team was just the same as selling alcohol. DLF thought running hotels, generating wind power, selling insurance and mutual funds would be a cake walk after they had created India’s biggest real estate company. Deccan Chronicle saw great synergy in selling newspapers and running a cricket team and a chain of bookshops. Hotel Leela thought running a business park would be similar to running a hotel. Kishore Biyani thought that once he got people inside his Big Bazaars and Pantaloon shops, he could sell them anything from mobile phone connections to life and general insurance. Bharti Telecom thought that mutual funds, insurance and retail were similar to running a successful telecom business.
Banks were more than happy to lend money to finance these expansions. And if money couldn’t be raised domestically it could always be raised internationally by issuing foreign currency convertible bonds (FCCBs). The beauty of these bonds was that the rate of interest on these bonds was almost close to zero. Hence, the companies raising money through this route did not see their profits fall because of interest payments.
So everybody lived happily ever after. Or at least that’s how it looked till a few years back.
In the prevailing euphoria these entrepreneurs did not realize that all the money they were raising in the form of debt would have to be returned. Even if they did, they were confident that all these expansions into unrelated territories would soon start making money and would generate enough profits to pay off the debt.
Other than unrelated diversifications companies also borrowed to fund their expansion into their core areas at a very rapid pace. As Nirmalya Kumar, a professor of marketing at the London Business School explained to me in an interview I did for the Daily News and Analysis a few years back “capacity never comes online at the same time as demand because you have to add capacity in chunks, whereas demand goes up as a smooth function. Capacity comes in chunks and people generally add capacity at the top of the cycle, rather than at the bottom of the cycle because at the bottom of the cycle, everybody is hurt and nobody knows when things will turn around.I cannot set up a cement plant every time there is a 100-tonne more demand in the country, because when I set up a cement plant, I set up a 2 million tonne cement plant. There will be times when there will be a shortage and there will be time when there will be lots, right? So this boom and bust always takes place.” (You can read the complete interview here).
Telecom companies raised a lot of debt to establish their presence all over the country only to realize that the consumer had too much choice leading to the telecom companies having to cut calling and smsing rates to ridiculously low levels(I have a sms pack which costs Rs 25 and gives me 15,000 messages free per month. If I exhaust that limit one sms costs one paisa). At one point of time the Mumbai circle had a dozen odd operators competing.
The wind energy company Suzlon raised a lot of money through the FCCB route to expand at a very past pace and became the darling of the stock market. DLF raised a lot of debt to build a land bank.
So during the boom businesses just expanded into related and unrelated areas. NDTV, a premier English news channel, tried getting into the entertainment channel business with NDTV Imagine. It lost a lot of money on it and finally sold out. Even the selling out did not help and the channel has since been shutdown. Peter Mukherjea a successful manager launched News X, which he had to sell off. Satyam, an IT company tried to diversify into real estate and infrastructure as Maytas (Satyam spelt backwards).
With all the easy money going around Biyani soon had major competition in the organized retail space with the Tata group, Birla group, Ambani group and even Sunil Bharti Mittal deciding to enter the organized retail space. Then there was also Subhiksha which expanded so fast that it soon had 1500 stores all over the country. This was also the era where media companies got into the real estate business. They also wanted to set up power and cement plants, and buy coal mines.
And most of this expansion was funded by companies by taking on more and more debt. Banks also got caught on to the euphoria that prevailed and gave out loans left, right and centre. The boom period has now run out. What we are seeing right now is the bust.
Businessmen now seem to be coming around to the realisation that they have ended up raising too much debt too fast and need to bring it down. Some of them like Subhiksha and Kingfisher have had to shut down their operations. Others are facing huge losses. As Sreenivasan Jain wrote in a recent column in DNA: “Last year, Reliance Fresh posted a loss of Rs 247 crore, Bharti posted a loss of Rs 266 crore, and Aditya Birla group, which runs the chain of More supermarkets, posted a loss of Rs 423 crore. Some retail chains have actually shut down, like Subhiksha which at one time had almost 1,500 outlets,” writes Jain. (You can read the complete article here)
The realisation also seems to have come around among businessmen that they need to sell of what they are now calling their “non-core assets”. Deccan Chronicle recently tried selling its Deccan Chargers IPL team but found no buyers willing to pay more than Rs 900 crore. Over the weekend BCCI cancelled its franchise. So all the debt that was raised to get the cricket team up and going has now gone down the drain. There are next to no assets to sell against it. DLF sitting on top of more than Rs 25,000 crore debt has been trying to sell its wind power business for a while now. Media reports also suggest that it is in the process of selling off Aman Resorts its foray into luxury hospitality business. The hotel DLF set up with Robert Vadra is also reported to be on the block. A couple of months back DLF managed to sell off its 17.5 acre land plot in Mumbai’s Lower Parel area to Lodha Developers for Rs 2750 crore. The company also managed to sell off Adone Hotels and Hospitality for Rs 567 crore.
Hotel Leela has been trying to sell its business park. Vijay Mallya managed to sell a stake in his F1 team to Sahara. Media reports suggest that Mallya has been in talks with the British company Diageo to sell United Spirits. There are also rumors that he is trying to sell real estate that he owns in Bangalore to pay off all the debt on Kingfisher Airlines. In the meanwhile no one seems to be interested in buying Kingfisher Airlines even though the government has allowed up to 49% foreign direct investment in the aviation sector.
Kishore Biyani managed to sell off Pantaloons and Future Capital in order to pare down his debt. The Bharti group got out of the education business by selling Centum Learning to Everonn education. Also some of the big companies that had got into organized retail have either closed their stores or scaled down the level of their operations. Suzlon is in major trouble. Its FCCB loans amounting to $221million(Rs 1,160 crore) are set to mature later this month and the company is in no position to repay. Its request to extend the repayment has been rejected by the bondholders. It is now being speculated that the company will default on these loans and go in for liquidation.
The learning out of all this is that it is easy to expand when the money is easily available and the going is good. But selling out when the tide turns around is not so easy.
But what businesses should have hopefully learnt more than anything is that in this day and age it pays to focus on a few businesses instead of trying to do everything under the sun just because money to expand is easily available.
In the past things did not change in business. An interesting example is that of the Ambassador car. The car had the same engine as of the original Morris Oxford which was made in 1944. And this engine was a part of the Ambassador car sold in India till 1982. The technology did not change for nearly four decades.
Given this lack of change, the businessmen could focus on multiple businesses at the same time. That is not possible anymore with technology and consumer needs and wants changing at a very fast pace. Even focused companies like Nokia missed out on the smart phone revolution in India.
Look at the newer businesses some of the big-older companies have got into over the years. The retail business of Ambanis hasn’t gone anywhere. Same is true with that of the retail business of the Aditya Birla group. The telecom business of the Tatas has lost a lot of money over the years. Though, they finally seem to be getting it right.
Hence it’s becoming more and more essential for businesses to focus on what they know best. To conclude, in the movie English Vinglish one of the characters who goes by the name of Salman Khan says “entrepreneur, shabd na hua poori ghazal ho gayi”. For the Indian entrepreneurs the expansions they thought would be as soulful as ghazals have turned into headache inducing heavy metal. Hopefully they have learnt their lessons.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on October 15, 2012. http://www.firstpost.com/business/biyani-mallya-suzlon-dlf-easy-money-screwed-up-india-inc-490747.html
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He can be reached at [email protected])