New Delhi, Delhi, India
CEO / Senior, Management Professional with an extensive understanding and experience of Complex and Challenging environments , Start ups and Turn around situations involving change management , restructuring and Team building. Have over 35 years of Cross cultural, General management, experience in Multinationals and Family owned, professionally run organizations across India, Middle East and Africa in the areas of FMCG, Retail, Manufacturing, Telecom and now Media. Proven ability to drive businesses through conceptualizing and evolving Strategy, People and cultural Transformation, digital innovation and augmenting & streamlining traditional and new age Go To Market Strategies. Have experience in managing large revenues, with stiff market share and business growth objectives in highly competitive environments.
Back to Ideating, Innovating and transforming. Building an Audio and content business once again in a whole new era of democratised, limitless content, new age content creators and AI.
A failed Start up journey. An attempt to a build a Food & Beverage House of Brands. Lost a lot of money, some friends and a bit of my reputation. But learnt a lot, met a whole new universe of people, lived through the ‘Funding Winter’, dealt with floundering founders and bumbling, bungling investors and thankfully landed on my feet.
The Audio/Radio Business of HT Media includes 3 brands, Contemporary hits station, Fever 104 FM, India's Only International Radio station, Radio One, and a Retro Music station, Radio Nasha. As The Audio industry transforms and Terrestrial Radio pushes the boundaries to Digital Audio, Podcasting and Anytime, Anywhere Audio, we seek to be centre stage in this transformation. HT's Radio business is Uniquely positioned with a multi station/format presence across Metros and tier 1 cities. Besides terrestrial Radio, it is a content and technology powerhouse, that also powers HT Smartcast, India's largest podcasting platform (with over 4 million monthly active listens across 25+ genres and 30+ platforms), Fab play, India's fastest growing digital On Premise Audio player and FAB Market, India's first Online Marketplace for Audio content. (now powering South Asian radio stations across the world with unique, differentiated content)
Leading and driving Innovations and New Businesses at HT media. The role involves, funnelling internal ideas and innovation and taking them through to building out new businesses as start ups with Agile teams. Over the last year and a half, we have launched six new businesses. The first two launched were a Podcasting business, HT Smartcast and a Health and Wellness portal, Healthshots. HT Smartcast ( www.htsmartcast.com ) has scaled up with over 1400 podcasts and 2500 episodes across 25+ genres and 30+ platforms. It is now amongst the largest Podcast publishers in the country with over 4 million unique listens per month. Healthshots ( www.hthealthshots.com )is a personalised and curated health and wellness portal focussed on the millennial woman and her needs. Its the millennial woman's daily dose of wellness, credible and consistent. Healthshots, in a year of launch, has set benchmarks in the category for quality content, best in class Users, and user engagement metrics with over 3 monthly page views and 2 million Monthly active users in Hindi and English. The other new Businesses launched include, FAB play, India's most technologically advanced, On Premise Audio Player, (www.fabplay.in ) FAB Market, India's first Online market place for Audio content (www.fabmarket.in) and HT classifieds.com (www.htclassifieds.com) the country's first fully integrated self serve portal for classified advertising.
Consequent to the merger of Hypercity Retail with Future Group , I took up the responsibility of leading the most ambitious Retail 3.0 vision of the group and its founder. As CEO for the Small format business, I led the neighbourhood store business comprising of four large brands Easy Day, Nilgiris, Heritage, and Food World (all recent acquisitions by the group) with a turnover of approximately Rs 2000 crores ( $300 million). The role involved leading the digital transformation and aggressive on ground expansion of the small format neighbourhood Food and grocery business across the country from 1000 physical stores to over 10000 omni channel, multi modal, micro local stores in the next five years, built on a platform of members, member curated assortments and a connected digital and physical ecosystem. Retail 3.0 was the group’s most ambitious foray into the future, focussed on a business model that we believed would change the way retail happened. Driven by Data, Technology and People, these stores were high on Tech and Touch, focussed single mindedly on members , communities, neighbourhoods and their needs 24/7.
HyperCITY Retail is part of The K Raheja Corp owned Shoppers Stop Retail and is a leading food and Grocery retailer in the country. The company operated Large format retail hyper markets across India with over a million square feet and Rs 1000 crores($150million) in revenue. As the CEO , my mandate was to turn the company around financially and lead revenue growth and expansion. The job involved cultural transformation, creating a performance based corporate environment based on knowledge, competence and execution and a Marketing and communication as well as a Range and Assortment based Re-positioning of the company that ensured the company was seen as the preferred and most admired Food retailer in the country amongst its target consumers. It also involved building its On line and Connected Commerce business by strategising , evolving and implementing its Omni channel strategy ensuring a seamless customer experience across both the On line and Brick and mortar environments. The re staging and turn around of the company led to a buy out by and merger with India’s Leading retailer, Future group.