Valuable lessons outside the classroom

I decided to take advantage of this sleepless night to discuss my first day of company visits. We learned yesterday that classes today were canceled due to a conflict with a meeting our professors had with the accrediting body that is currently auditing Welingkar. In leiu of class, we had two company visits scheduled, Reliance Mutual Fund and Mecklai Research and Analysis (a risk management company). The visits were originally scheduled to start early in the morning, with our pick up time at the hostel 9:30, but in typical Indian fashion, we were reschedule at last minute. Our new pick up time was 12:30 pm, which gave me a nice leisurely morning.

I woke up relatively early (from a very restless night of sleep), and had a wonderful morning for undisclosed reasons :-) At almost exactly 12:30 pm, we were picked up by the Welingkar van and headed to the boys hostel to collect them. Our meeting at Reliance began at 2 pm (we made it there just in time, traffic is ridiculous). We were shuffled into a back conference room, where we had almost a 30 minute wait (but were served coffee, tea and water). We met with the President and Director of Human Resources. They both spoke at length about the background of Reliance, and how it is starting to revolutionize the Indian Economy.

The President continued to stress on how India is "in its time" with the economy growing at 8% (a feat matched only by China), but that this was a "cash society" in which less than 2% of the population invests in mutual funds and less than 2% of household savings entering the capital markets. But through consumer education, Reliance is trying to capitalize on their presence in the community through telecom holdings and encourage Indians to trust in their company enough to invest in their mutual funds. They have one of the "best open ended schemes" in the world according to Lipitz, and they pride themselves on building relationships and taking a hands on approach to management. In fact, their funds invest in 400-500 Indian companies, and they make personal visits to all companies before deciding to invest in them. It is this hands on approach that has allowed Reliance to identify some huge growth opportunities... and they continue to see huge growth in India. India constitutes 1.4% of the global GDP but yet only .4% of the world capital market.

I may have lost some of you in the last paragraph, as I glazed over a little during all this talk... but I thought the most interesting aspect was the hands on approach they took to mutual fund management. They chose to invest in companies they think havea hunger for growth, with ambitious plans and quality management and business in place. They go so far as to know a company before they invest in them, that they shared a story of camping outside an office building to get to know all the employees, to booking a plane ticket to sit next to a managing director to gain 11 hours of his uninterupted time. Indians, as a population, tends to be rely heavily on trust, and it is by its clients trusting Reliance that they have grown to be the largest mutual fund in India. Most Indians do not use banks... or use the post office as a bank (as the post office is the most wide spread network that reaches to the far corners of the country)... so to get Indians to use capital markets and equity/debt instruments is pretty impressive.

Our time at Reliance was information intensive (as can be gleaned from the above analysis), but our time at the second company, Mecklai was much more of a holistic approach to differences in business in Indian versus business in America. We arrived at the second company, and were escorted inside only to find that almost all the employees were asked to leave their desks and give up their chairs so that we could sit around and listen to the CEO and (didn't catch the other guy's title)... I felt bad, but the employees seemed relieved to have a break. (There are very few people that have a private work space in the offices I have seen thus far (including the professors at Welingkar) there is simply not space... the cubicle is even rarely seen. I can not imagine keeping such intimate work quarters with my fellow employees, talk about getting on each other's nerves!). The CEO spoke with us first (it was great, he had a bright fuschia shirt with a flamingo/palm tree tie!) about how business is essentially the same everywhere--you want to make money and have fun! His observation as to the big difference (although he was noncommital as to how this played out in the actual mechanics of day to day business) was that everyone in India believes in god and takes great pride in their religion--often displaying some icon/depiction of their religious beliefs on their desk. I have noticed this similiar pride in religion found in the "taxi bling" I refer to. He then went on to explain to us about the commute to South Mumbai "The City" from the suburbs and how his commute is roughly 2 hours each way, but some employees travel 4 hours each way... I don't feel so bad about having an hour commute one way last summer!

After this, the other gentleman spoke with us more about Mecklai's role in risk management (mostly currency and interest rate risk) and the use of forwards, options, futures in India and how that market is growing. I unfortunately got a little restless during this discussion because I had a difficult time understanding/hearing the man. His accent was very thick and it was taking too much energy to hear him, considering he was soft spoken to begin with.

But both visits were still very interesting and started to reveal a little of some of the idiosyncracies of Indian business. It was also nice to get a day out of the classroom, although I fear we'll have to make up today's missed class on an upcoming Saturday (might as well, not like I have other plans!).

I spent the evening catching up on some emails, and listening to my new favorite playlist of some great classical music that I've found particularly soothing lately. I was also able to catch both Friends and the Simpsons on StarWorld, so that's always exciting. However, after numerous failed attempts to sleep, I'm a little discouraged and may have to turn to reading my statistics book to lull me to sleep. (Or maybe I could just read this entry again and it would put me to sleep... not the most glamorous nor adventurous days, my apologies)

I better try and sleep. We have class 2 hours earlier than usual tomorrow, so that our professors have the rest of the day off to celebrate Indian Independence Day!