The subtle stories

Companies' brochures are full of serious insights

I read company brochures and magazines carefully. The design of annual reports is important for me. These give me serious insights into what's happening in a company and what's going on inside its promoter's mind. I recently happened to see the annual report of a large Kolkata-based company that is owned by a Marwari family. The report was unusually thick and the paper was glossy. There were various pictures of family members - men and women, young and old. The men were all in Bengali dhoti and kurta, though at work most of them are dressed impeccably in western wear, and the women all wore Bengali saris.

Then the realisation struck me. The family had, of late, gone through some local problems. Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of West Bengal, was unhappy with them. It was possible that her unhappiness could snowball into an anti-Marwari wave in the city. Since most of their assets are in West Bengal, this was the family's way of sending the message that it is not an outsider - it is fully assimilated into the local milieu and has adopted the Bengali dress code! What better way to do it than through your annual report: the document will be circulated amongst hundreds of thousands of people, and some copies may, hopefully, find their way to the powers that be in Kolkata.

Vijay Mallya's newsletters, when his business was in better shape, were a delight to flip through. The underlying theme was the unabashed lifestyle of the businessman. At the other end of the spectrum are public sector newsletters: dour but informative. In the 1970s, when the Licence Raj was at its peak, many companies would make it a point to include pictures of their promoters with national leaders somewhere in the annual report. These would be totally out of context, but the writers of the report would find a way to insert them. The idea was to send an unequivocal message to the shareholders that your promoter is well connected in the echelons of power and fixing the government is unlikely to be a problem. These were real concerns at that time. The core competence of businessmen was to secure licences for themselves and block rivals from getting them. The shareholders had to be told this but no businessman would dare to put it in writing. This was a subtle way of telling shareholders that the promoter's skills in "environment management" were robust.

Some years back, I happened to see the 1971 annual report of Ranbaxy. At that time, it was owned and run by Bhai Mohan Singh (the grandfather of brothers Malvinder and Shivinder Singh). On its first page, the report had a photograph of Bhai Mohan Singh presenting a box of Ranbaxy medicines for the National Relief Fund to the then prime minister, Indira Gandhi. The photograph showed the prime minister with a benevolent smile on her face, a slightly bent Bhai Mohan Singh standing next to her, his hands folded, while PC Sethi, the minister for petroleum, chemicals and fertilisers (and hence the minister in charge of the pharmaceutical industry), looked on. The picture could have served no other motive but to inform all the people who mattered that Bhai Mohan Singh had access to Indira Gandhi. This photograph, incidentally, made its reappearance in the 1974 annual report as well - on the first page again.

In 1974, a booklet was brought out to honour Bhai Mohan Singh. It listed no less than 30 social and religious organisations of which Bhai Mohan Singh was a member. These organisations opened the doors to the power centres that mattered. This is how it worked. Bhai Mohan Singh, for instance, worked closely with the Tuberculosis Association of India. Every year, the association would kick off its campaign with the president of the country. If nothing, this provided Bhai Mohan Singh at least one photo opportunity with the president! Bhai Mohan Singh was the vice-president and general secretary of the All India Society for Prevention of Blindness. The president of the society was none other than Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, the health minister.

bhupesh.bhandari@bsmail.in