BOOK REVIEW. It just keeps rolling along

One has come across quite a few entrepreneurs from the old economy who have a disdain for their counterparts in e-commerce. It is not surprising. Take the case of Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal of Snapdeal, the e-commerce company they founded in 2010. In no time, the company was the Number Two player in the industry and got hallowed investors such as Japanese multinational Softbank and Chinese billionaire and e-commerce icon Jack Ma.

In fact, many touted that Snapdeal would eventually overtake market leader Flipkart and become India’s Alibaba, the Chinese company founded by Jack Ma.

But the script changed dramatically. Even as it lost market share, Snapdeal’s valuation took a deep dive down south. From about $6 billion in 2016, Snapdeal is now said to be valued at a little over $1 billion as its shareholders explore a sell-out to Flipkart. Within seven years, life has come a full circle for Snapdeal, and for its founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal.

Rolling on Compare this story to that of Apollo Tyres and its Chairman and Managing Director Onkar S Kanwar. The company was founded in 1972 by his father, Raunaq Singh, one of the leading entrepreneurs in the country during the License Raj era. The Delhi-based businessman set up several ventures, including those that manufactured steel pipes and auto components. In the early 1970s, he landed a license to set up a tyre factory in far away Kerala. Though he set up the plant, the company had a tough time from the beginning, mired in labour strife and hounded by banks who wanted to recover their loans to Apollo.

If that was not enough, the tyre company faced new challenges. As a close associate of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Singh had to face the music when the Congress lost elections in the aftermath of the Emergency.

Apollo’s board was dissolved by an order of the Supreme Court and was replaced by an Interim Board. Though Gandhi came back to power in 1980, woes at the tyre company were far from over. Singh even thought of selling the company for ₹1!

It was only at the insistence of Onkar Kanwar that Singh held back and gave his eldest son a chance to revive the troubled unit.

From 1980, when Onkar Kanwar moved to Kerala, the fate of Apollo changed, one tyre at a time. Onkar negotiated with labour unions and also focused on better products to start a gradual change. When the young Onkar joined Apollo, the company was losing ₹4 crore a year. In his second year, it made an annual profit of ₹6 crore.

Ties that bind Over the next 30 years, he oversaw a dramatic rise of Apollo. It stitched up some impressive partnerships with the likes of General Tire (some didn’t work out like the one with Michelin), expanded the company’s manufacturing presence within India and overseas, and made impressive acquisitions, including that of Dunlop’s African business.

Though his most ambitious project, the audacious $2.5 billion-buy of the bigger peer, Cooper Tire & Rubber, didn’t work out, Onkar Kanwar built Apollo as India’s largest tyre company with world-class facilities. It’s revenues top $2 billion, and has manufacturing units in India, Africa, Holland (through its acquisition of Vredestein) and the one in Hungary that was opened earlier this year. The company employs 16,000 people.

In between these milestones, Onkar Kanwar also had to confront his father who tried to wrest back the controls of Apollo after his eldest son had made a profitable business out of it. It was a dramatic period for the family and the company, as the father and son faced off in AGMs and board meetings. Eventually, popular support, and the votes went in Onkar’s favour.

Chequered life It might be unfair to compare the careers of Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, with that of Onkar Kanwar, given the differences in the sectors that the two sets of promoters work in. But there is an essence of romance and intrigue in the way entrepreneurs from the brick and mortar sectors had to find their way around myriad problems. There were hardly any low lying fruits and easy gratification. And the business wasn’t a business unless it made money.

To that extent, The Man Behind the Wheel is a page-turner of a biography that makes you marvel at the street-smartness of the Sardar. Apollo is indeed one of the biggest success stories coming out of India Inc.

What’s missing But it is a story not many are aware of. Bouquet, a journalist whose bylines have appeared in Telegraph Magazine and Vanity Fair , has made a strong case of Onkar Kanwar in his book. From tracing the family history in Pakistan, to the latest generation in leadership role, which is Onkar’s son Neeraj Kanwar, Bouquet has made the most of the access granted to him.

Bouquet is in his elements in the pages that talk about the many merger and acquisition stories of Apollo. Not surprising for anyone who has read his earlier book Cold Steel , an adrenaline-laden account of Lakshmi Mittal’s acquisition of Arcelor. But therein lays the main pique with the book.

Much of the latter half of the book is dominated by accounts of Apollo’s M&A activities, which were led by Neeraj Kanwar. Though the overarching presence of Onkar Kanwar is unmistakable, the younger generation fuelled these buys. Kanwar’s brilliance was in leading Apollo through the changing economic environment in the country and making it a world-beater by the turn of the century. One wishes there was more of these times in the book.

MEET THE AUTHOR: Tim Bouquet is a journalist who has reported on military conflicts, crime and takeover battles for Telegraph Magazine, The Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Esquire, etc. He has authored a crime novel and two works of non-fiction, notably Cold Steel: Lakshmi Mittal and the Multi-Billion-Dollar-Battle for a Global Empire.

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