What makes this Titanian tick?

Titan has been on a red-hot ride for the past few years and its growth has been closely dissected and analysed; In a free-wheeling chat with The Hindu businessline, C. K. Venkataraman, Managing Director, Titan Co., talks about his long career in the compa

In the early 2000s, C. K. Venkataraman, the MD of Titan Co. Ltd., had an offer to head the Levi’s in India. After Titan’s founding MD ◣erxes Desai heard Venkat had put in his papers, he called Venkat in and bawled. He said Titan is one big family, and you don’t quit family! So, Venkat withdrew his resignation. In retrospect, Venkat went on to head Tanishq, which now contributes over 80% of Titan’s revenue, for 17 years, and wound up as MD of the company. And Titan now, in terms of market cap, is the second largest in the Tata group. But Venkat’s affinity for Levi’s continued as his favoured brand of clothing is Levi’s jeans.

And he’s in Levi’s jeans paired with an ethnic casual shirt the morning we meet him at the Leela Palace on Bengaluru’s old airport road for breakfast.

Titan has been on a redhot ride for the past few years and its growth has been closely dissected and analysed. So, we decide to ask Venkat more about his life and times and what makes the watch manturnedjeweller tick.

Venkat spent the first five years of life in Mettur, near Salem, where his father worked for Mettur Chemicals. His grandfather was a lawyer in Coimbatore and in 1970 the family moved in with him into a sprawling 10,000 sq. ft. house. “I had studied in the Tamil medium initially and in Coimbatore, the school headmaster, my father’s friend asked my dad if I was to be admitted in Tamil or English medium, and my dad said, English, of course.

“In retrospect, I am glad he did because it makes you eligible to participate in a larger world,” recalls Venkat. His grandmother would buy yards of the same cloth and make skirts for his sister and shirts for his older brother and him and they would get tease by their friends. “It was tough love,” recalls Venkat. with a smile.

His later years in school saw him tinkering with assembled radios ‘the joy His later years in school saw him tinkering with assembled radios “the joy was to keep tuning it till it suddenly caught a signal” which ignited a passion for electronics engineering. However, he didn’t get admission to this course and settled for a BSc in Maths, followed by a year of CA, which bored him.

He joined Sarabhais in Mumbai and the following year, a bunch from the company wrote and cracked the CAT. Venkat earned his MBA from IIMA in 1985 and moved to join advertising firm MAA in Bangalore as his parents were alone there.

He met his future wife, Bharati, at MAA. Then Venkat joined Mudra as it was being set up where he was accounts supervisor and R.

Balki, who later would be an acclaimed filmmaker, was a copy writer.

Pitching to clients

“We had no business. I used to sit pillion on my boss R. Sridhar’s TVS Suzuki and go round with layouts and pitch them to clients saying we have a campaign for you, but I soon got fed up with this.”

On October 30, 1989, his birthday, an ad appeared for an ad manager for Titan. The profile matched Venkat’s and he joined Titan, little knowing he would spend the next 35 years in the company.

Though Venkat heads a large consumer products firm, with a clutch of luxury brands, he remains grounded in the middleclass ethos he grew up in. To most places, he still travels by train, eats roadside stuff in remote places. He still lives in the LIC colony where the family bought a house 25 years ago.

“We only upgraded to a larger house in the same colony,” he explains. We ask him if that ethos does not militate against his role of being the chief of a company that markets some highend luxury brands?

It’s an interesting conundrum, he says thoughtfully. “At Zoya, for example, I was at the centre of creation of the brand. But I find it perfectly fine as my discrimination and refinement for choosing the right standards for Zoya are quite different from my lifestyle. It has not hampered by what I do or how I live.”

Global foray

We ask Venkat about Titan’s international foray and reentry into the U.S. market a few years ago. After Titan’s disastrous foray into nine Europe in the 1990s, it withdrew, stung. In the 2000s it again forayed with Tanishq into the U.S. in a calibrated way, but again shut down. We ask Venkat why.

Venkat says an important difference between what it did in 2008 and now was in the earlier foray, it targeted white Americans and Hispanics. “The feeling was the nextgen Indian in America would have become assimilated. We thought there would no longer be an NRI market for a brand like Tanishq which was wrong in the hindsight,” he says.

But with so many brands in the U.S. market, it couldn’t get enough Americans to walk into the store. “And the money we needed to spend to get them into the stores was looking really large. And Lehman happened,” recalls Venkat. Tanishq then withdrew from the U.S.

However, now, much has changed.

Tanishq is going after the diaspora. Indians in 2020 are very different, he explains. Indian CEOs have made strides in the U.S., the community is sitting on greater wealth and there’s a newfound confidence in

Indianness. “It’s a huge difference now and its showing. Our ambition is high for jewellery; we want white Americans and Hispanics also to flock to our stores.” Tanishq has 14 stores outside of India with four in the U.S.

We ask Venkat what’s turbo charged Titan in the past few years that revenue and mcap had soared.

The first thing is some 20 people came into new roles and six CEOs were new. So are the CFO and the CTO. “Some are new to the firm, some new to the role. So, they brought a freshness to the job.”

COVID19 brought agility and the firm transformed digitally. It also restructured, creating an international business division. “The average age across the company also dropped; each CEO wants to contribute; the multiplier effect of all that effort is showing now,” he elaborates, adding growth in the Indian business environment too had contributed.

While many joke that Titan is now a jewellery company with a watch business attached, it’s Titan’s initial and instant success in watches that gave it the impetus to unveil jewellery.

We ask Venkat what the future of the analogue wrist watch is. “It’s in the hands of the industry and we are doing a good job to keep the meaning of wrist watch alive.

“The analogue watch is an accessory, a symbol of selfexpression and status.”

(The writers are with The Hindu businessline)