LUNCH WITH BS: Surinder Kapur

Kaizen diary

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Much like the Japanese quality mantra suggests, the life of this auto component maestro has been full of small but confident steps.

In the 1980s, a horde of Japanese automobile companies descended on India "" Suzuki, Honda, Toyota, Yamaha, Mitsubishi, to name a few. They sired a whole new generation of auto component manufacturers and brought the Japanese work culture to India through them. Peppered with terms like Kaizen, just-in-time and so on, the country's shop floor language has never been the same again.

Surinder Kapur, the chairman of the Rs 800-crore Sona Group, is a child of that revolution. We are at La Piazza, the Italian restaurant at the Hyatt Regency hotel. We down Castle Lager, while Kapur's on Martini-soda, giving us insights into how the Japanese function.

"These guys are not spontaneous. They have a great regard for moving forward with complete consensus within the office. They start with a lot of deliberation, which may seem slow. But once they get moving, nothing stops them," he says.

Kapur can hardly speak any Japanese, but knows that the Japanese love dinner meetings and golf. "Even the casual communication on the golf course is important for them. I don't play golf, but I do the next best thing with them "" I go to Karaoke Bars," says the 50-something, grandfather of two.

We change track and ask him what made him call his group Sona. Kapur comes from a family of jewellers "" the family's store, Kapur di Hatti in Connaught Place, is now run by his nephews. "When I got into components, I wanted some association with the family business," Kapur says, adding: "Sona also stands for earning the trust of your customer."

So, apart from a fake clutch plate, can Kapur still tell a diamond from glass? "I can still tell a bad diamond from a good one "" but I cannot tell a good diamond from a very good one," he says over Minestrone soup.

From gold to steering columns, Kapur's career was decided by his father over lunch at a Delhi restaurant. With one shop and six sons to settle, the father told his sons what he wanted them to be. The entry against Kapur said engineer.

Kapur managed to get admission to three universities in the US "" Stanford, Michigan and New York "" but chose Michigan because it would ease the financial burden on his father. Kapur went on to complete his bachelors, masters and then doctorate from Michigan. Douglas Aircraft sponsored his PhD in aerospace and fluid-dynamics.

On his return, for a moment it seemed Kapur was headed for a long and inglorious career in the public sector. "Hindustan Aeronautics was the only option then," he says.

But another curious turn of fate was awaiting him. Kapur was married to the daughter of Raunaq Singh of Apollo Tyres. Singh was setting up a new company called Bharat Gears in Mumbai and wanted Kapur to run the show.

Kapur recounts his days in Mumbai. Dana Corporation of the US was willing to place huge orders from Bharat Gears, but was worried about the labour problems in India. Fire-brand trade union leader Datta Samant was a constant reason for worry and his name was famous outside India, too. Kapur managed to strike a special deal with Samant, and Bharat Gears managed to win the confidence of Dana.

This quality to pull along even the highly combustible trade union leaders has not deserted him even today. When Gurgaon was burning of labour problems in the recent past, Sona Group remained an island of trouble-free operations. A union leader attached to the All India Trade Union Congress, while making a list of units in Gurgaon that flaunt labour laws, said that Sona was one unit they would leave alone. "We don't see much of a problem there," said this union leader, who later went on to make life difficult for bigger companies such as Hero Honda.

By the mid-1980s, Kapur says he had decided to branch out on his own. "Did it have something to do with the public spat between Raunaq Singh and his son, Onkar Singh Kanwar, over the control of group companies?" we asked as soon as Kapur took his first bite of margarita pizza.

"Not at all," Kapur says, "Neither my wife nor I owned a single share in the company." Instead, he adds, he saw a business opportunity in the Japanese automobile companies setting up shop in the country.

Kapur met V Krishnamurthy and R C Bhargava of Maruti, who told him that he only had to choose what parts he wanted to make, so long as he let Maruti take an equity stake in his company. Maruti wanted 26 per cent, but Kapur would give only 10. For technology, Kapur leaned eastwards and brought on board Koyo of Japan.

Since then, Kapur has steadily grown his business to more joint ventures including one with Fuji Autotech and another one with the Mahindras. "This was the highest point in my life. While working for Bharat Gears, I used to know Keshub Mahindra. But I never imagined that we would become business partners one day," he says.

Outside India, he has a 21 per cent interest in a French component company, which has opened the gates for him not just to Europe but also to Brazil. When the assets of Delphi were recently put on the block, Kapur's name was amongst the list of prospective buyers doing the rounds.

Moving on to coffee, Kapur says that Delphi's interest wouldn't interest him because only the old assets of the company are likely to be sold. But he says that he has mandated a boutique merchant banker to look for possible acquisitions in the US.

"What is the succession planning you have done for your business?" we fire our final question at Kapur. According to Kapur, all his companies, except Sona Koyo, the flagship, has a professional CEO. His son, Sanjay (married to Bollywood star Karishma Kapoor), will inherit the Sona Group, but is not likely to run it. "He might become a non-executive chairman," says Kapur.

Now, what do you call that in Japanese?