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Nadir Godrej: The first thing that you think of about Bombay is that it is a cosmopolitan city. It is on the western coast of India. It was open to the rest of the world from the earliest possible times. And so, it has always been a global city. The Romans and the Greeks had also come to Bombay. Another thing that comes to mind is that it is a financial city. It is where the stock exchanges are. It is where the Reserve Bank of India is. So, in a sense, it is like the New York of India. Delhi is Washington DC and we are New York. New York is the big apple and we are the big mango.
Absolutely, big mango. But this big mango, a lot of dreams, right, that are fulfilled by this mango as well.
Nadir Godrej: Yes.
And that is the ethos of this state and this city as well because so many people every day migrate to this city just to fulfill their dreams, whether it is business, whether it is acting.
Nadir Godrej: Yes, entertainment, business, everything is centred in Mumbai.
It is the amount of people that come in and that is the growth that we will talk about as well. So, Bombay has a growth story when you talked about it in the 80s, to now Mumbai in 2024. What is it that you have seen in terms of the growth story?
Nadir Godrej: The population has grown a lot. The city has become quite crowded, high rise and in the last five years has gone even higher and all these changes have come to Bombay. Infrastructure has developed. We just had the inauguration of the Atal Setu a little while ago and the coastal road should be ready soon. But at the same time, air pollution has increased, that is one of the unfortunate things and I hope the government takes care of it as soon as possible because otherwise it will be very bad news for Bombay or Mumbai.
Absolutely. And so, I am going to talk about infra. At first, most lived within the fort. More were attracted by the port. The population kept growing and the islands started flowing. In order to have space to build, the sea was slowly filled between the islands. So, that is where it started, our building, our infrastructure and today where do you see this infrastructure boom moving towards in Bombay? The Atal Setu has been built. What is that boom that we could see now from here on as well?
Nadir Godrej: Yes, the Atal Setu greatly increases the area of Bombay which always was a metropolis and now it is becoming what the Americans call a megalopolis. Like Boswash, which is a big urban area all the way from Boston to Washington DC with New York included. So, Pune will become part of Bombay now with the Atal Setu, the distance is very short and everything in between will be one big, huge megalopolis.
Megalopolis and when you are talking about the Godrej Group as well, when we say that you all started as a lock and key company. Today, we have achieved miles in terms of diversification that we see for the company as well. It is not easy to have such a diversified business, from lock and key, soaps, agri, chemicals, across sectors. How is it that as a business in Bombay that this diversification helped for the group, as well as in terms of the city that helped you in terms of that as well?
Nadir Godrej: In the early days, we had two companies, Godrej & Boyce, which was steel products, started off, as you said, with locks and then went on to safes and office furniture and later on refrigerators, typewriters, computers for a while and even aerospace and so on. But the other company was Godrej Soaps and that diversified into quite a lot of things. My father did his PhD in Germany. He was in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1939 as a student. Had to leave Germany in 1939 when the war was imminent and only went back in 1949 to get his thesis and his thesis was on making soaps from fatty acids. So, we also started the fatty acid industry.
Apart from making soaps, we started making oleochemicals. First, fatty acids and many years later, fatty alcohols. We also went into the agri business. My brother set up a solvent extraction plant and we used to make groundnut meal and extract groundnut oil from groundnut cake and then we went into the animal feed business quite by accident because Bühler and Larsen & Toubro started a plant to make animal feed. They could not sell any plants, so they closed down their business and their prototype they sold to my brother…And that is what…
Nadir Godrej: That became Godrej Agrovet.
When you started working at Godrej, where was the group and how much has changed today and where do you see it going in the next five years?
Nadir Godrej: Yes, I do not remember exactly where the group was when I joined in 1976. But I do remember that when my brother joined in 1963, there was quite a lot of growth from 1963 to 1976. The turnover of Godrej Soaps was Rs 2 crore. Of course, Rs 2 crore then was a lot more than it is now.
That is really there in terms of counting, but yes. But…
Nadir Godrej: But still it was only Rs 2 crore and today, Godrej Consumer products turnover is over Rs 10,000 crore. So, there was a lot of change. When I joined the business, I joined in the animal feed business and helped develop the new businesses of Godrej Agrovet including the oil palm business and also in the late 1980s, when we set up an oleochemical plant in Valia, originally to make natural alpha olefins, but ultimately we ended up making fatty alcohol, that plant went through a very crisis situation.
One year our loss was Rs 90 crore, but I was able to turn it around with the help of all my team. We used to have regular meetings and people used to come up with good ideas and there was no market for fatty alcohol in India, so we had to export it, we had to develop it. And once I went through that challenge, it gave me a lot of confidence and after that I was involved in the chemicals business of Godrej Industries and, of course, I continued with Godrej Agrovet as well.
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