Here’s a number that should stop you: in FY26, Amal Ltd grew consolidated revenue 77%, to ₹240 crore. Here’s the number nobody put in the headline: profit before tax fell 14%, standalone PBT fell 32%, and the operating margin halved from 32% to 15%.

Grow the top line by three-quarters and earn less money. That’s not a typo. It’s the entire story of this company, and it’s a near-perfect case study in why you never, ever read a chemicals company off its revenue line.

Amal is a small-cap — about ₹760 crore market value — controlled by Atul Ltd of the Lalbhai group, chaired by Sunil Lalbhai. It’s almost debt-free, sitting on a modest cash pile, with a 71% promoter holding. On the surface: a well-parented, clean-balance-sheet compounder. Underneath: a commodity converter whose recent “growth” was borrowed from a sulphur-price spike and is now handing itself back. Let’s read it the way the filing wants to be read.

The one-year chart tells you the market already figured this out — the stock is down ~36% and sits closer to its 52-week low than its ₹1,148 high. This issue is about why, and whether what’s left is worth ₹34 of price for every ₹1 of earnings.

The promoter: the best and the most complicating fact

Amal is controlled by Atul Ltd, which holds ~49.86% through Atul Finserv, with total promoter holding at 71.35%. That’s the Lalbhai group — one of India’s oldest, most conservative industrial houses, the same lineage as Arvind. Sunil Lalbhai, Atul’s chairman, chairs Amal too.

This cuts two ways, and you have to hold both.

The good: parentage like this means clean books, no promoter-pledging games, no siphoning, patient capital, and a genuine willingness to fund Amal out of a rough past. And the past was rough — this company was referred to BIFR and formally declared a sick industrial company back in 2006. That it’s debt-free and profitable at all today is the Atul turnaround at work.

The complicating bit: Amal is, to a meaningful degree, a captive-adjacent supplier within the Atul ecosystem, and a small satellite of a much larger parent. Related-party dynamics matter here — a chunk of the story is sulphuric acid and oleum feeding into group and industry demand. As a minority shareholder you’re a passenger in a vehicle the Lalbhais steer for their own broader logic. That’s usually fine. It’s rarely lucrative on its own terms, because the parent has little reason to let unusual value accrue to Amal’s minority holders rather than to the group.

Governance flags: essentially none. Promoter holding has been rock-stable at ~71% for years, no dilution, no odd related-party leakage that jumps off the page, clean secretarial compliance. This is the opposite of a governance-risk stock. The risk here is entirely about the business, not the stewards.

Shareholding: the tell is the stability

Look at the register and what’s striking is how little moves. Promoters ~71.35%, and — this is the part worth dwelling on — institutions own essentially nothing. DIIs hold 0.03%. No FIIs to speak of. The remaining ~28.6% is public/retail.

That absence is information. No mutual fund, no serious institutional analyst, has built a position. For a debt-free, profitable, well-parented company, that’s not an accident — it’s the market telling you this is a thin, illiquid, commodity-exposed small-cap that doesn’t clear an institutional quality-and-size filter. Shareholder count actually jumped from ~14,500 to ~18,800 in 2025 during the price run-up, then started drifting down as the stock fell. Retail chased the sulphur-spike earnings; retail is now holding the fade. A familiar pattern.

The business: a converter, not a compounder

Strip away the language and Amal does one core thing: it takes sulphur and turns it into sulphuric acid, oleum, and downstream sulphur dioxide and sulphur trioxide. These feed dyes, fertiliser, personal care, petrochemicals, pharma and textiles. There’s a specialty leg through the wholly-owned Amal Speciality Chemicals (ASCL, 300 tpd), a new H-Acid plant that’s completed trial runs, agrochemical-intermediate moves at Roha, and a plan to sell the old Ankleshwar unit.

But the economic engine is sulphur conversion. And that’s the problem, because it defines the moat: there basically isn’t one.

Sulphuric acid is close to a commodity. The single biggest cost is sulphur, and when sulphur prices spiked 164% in FY26, two things happened in sequence. First, revenue exploded — because selling prices track input costs, so a sulphur spike mechanically inflates the top line without a single extra tonne sold. Then margins collapsed — because when your input cost runs up 164% and you have no pricing power, you cannot pass it all through, and you eat the difference.

That’s the whole FY26 story in one paragraph. The 77% “growth” was sulphur passing through the P&L. The 14% profit decline was the business failing to defend its spread. Revenue went up because the business got harder, not because it got bigger.

The forensic section: reading past the spike

This is the issue where the forensic lens earns its keep, because almost everything on the surface is misleading.

First tell — margin, not revenue, is the truth serum. Look at the quarterly path. Operating margin ran at an eye-watering 44.5% in the December 2024 quarter, at the top of the sulphur cycle. Then: 26.9%, 24.6%, 15.9%, 12.9%, and 9.7% by March 2026. Five straight quarters of compression. A business with real pricing power does not give back three-quarters of its margin in five quarters. This one did, because the margin was never structural — it was the gift of a favourable spread that reversed.

If you had valued this company off its December-2024 run-rate — which is exactly what the market did when it paid ₹1,148 — you were capitalising a commodity peak as if it were permanent earnings. The single most common way retail investors lose money in chemicals.

Second tell — the working-capital blow-out. Here’s the one the machine-generated summaries actually flagged: working-capital days went from around −11 to +62 in a single year. Read what that means. For years Amal ran negative working capital — its suppliers and advances effectively funded the operation, a comfortable position. In FY26 that flipped hard: debtor days crept up, payables normalised down from 68 to 38, and suddenly ₹60-odd crore of annual sales’ worth of cash got tied up in the cycle that used to be self-funding.

This is why operating cash flow fell to ₹22 crore in FY26 from ₹50 crore in FY25 even though reported profit was similar. Cash conversion (CFO as a share of operating profit) dropped from 119% to 61%. The profit didn’t turn into cash because the growth — such as it was — ate the cash. For a debt-free company this isn’t dangerous, but it’s a quiet erosion of the one thing that made the balance sheet elegant.

Third — the profit quality is actually honest, which matters. Unlike a lot of forensic cases, Amal isn’t dressing anything up. Other income is negligible (it isn’t propping up profit). Depreciation is steady at ~₹9 crore, no games with useful lives. There’s no aggressive capitalisation inflating earnings; if anything the reverse — the H-Acid plant and capex are being spent through cleanly. The effective tax rate is lumpy quarter to quarter (65.9% in the March quarter looks alarming but is a small-base timing artefact on tiny absolute profit). So the accounting is clean. The problem isn’t that the numbers are fake. It’s that the good numbers were cyclical and are mean-reverting in plain sight.

Fourth — the Ankleshwar sale and asset shuffle. The company is selling its old Ankleshwar unit (subject to approvals) and has brought on the new H-Acid plant. This is sensible housekeeping — rotating out of an old asset, adding a specialty product. But watch how it’s reported: an asset sale can throw a one-off gain into a future P&L that looks like “profit” but is nothing of the sort. When the sale closes, read the notes and strip any disposal gain out before you judge the operating run-rate. I’d flag this as the single most likely place next year’s headline number gets flattered by something non-recurring.

Net read: a clean, honestly-accounted, debt-free small-cap whose reported FY25–26 prosperity was a commodity-spread event, now normalising. Nothing sinister. But nothing you’d capitalise at 34x either.

Industry outlook

Sulphuric acid demand in India is structurally fine — fertiliser, and increasingly, downstream chemicals and even battery/processing chemistry provide a long, dull, GDP-plus demand runway. That’s the bull case for the industry. But it’s a commodity with limited differentiation, cyclical input costs, and pricing set by the spread between sulphur and acid — a spread Amal doesn’t control. The specialty push (ASCL, H-Acid, agro-intermediates) is the only path to something margin-defensible, and it’s early, small, and unproven at scale against far larger specialty players. The honest industry framing: a stable-demand, low-moat base business with an optional, not-yet-earned specialty upside.

Guidance vs. delivery

Amal doesn’t give the kind of hard numerical guidance a large-cap would; it’s too small and too parent-run for that. What it does communicate — capacity expansion, the specialty pivot, the Ankleshwar rationalisation — it has broadly executed on operationally. The turnaround from BIFR-sick to debt-free is real delivery over a decade. But there’s no evidence yet of the thing that would matter most: that the specialty transition can produce structural margins that survive a full commodity down-cycle. FY26 was the first real test of that, and the answer so far is no — margins tracked sulphur straight down.

Valuation: what 34x is asking you to believe

A commodity converter earning ₹22 crore, in a down-cycle for its spread, with no institutional following and a controlling parent, is trading at ~34x earnings and ~6.9x book. That is not a cheap stock. It’s priced as if the FY25 margins were the baseline and the specialty pivot is a sure thing.

Reverse it: to justify 34x, Amal has to re-rate its earnings base structurally higher — meaning the specialty products (H-Acid, agro-intermediates) have to deliver defensible double-digit-plus margins at scale, and the sulphur spread has to cooperate. If instead FY26’s compressed margin is closer to mid-cycle truth, then the “E” in that P/E is inflated by the market anchoring on the spike, and the multiple is really much higher on normalised earnings. On a mid-cycle earnings estimate, this could easily be a 45–55x stock wearing a 34x label. The market’s 36% haircut over the past year is it partway through repricing exactly this realisation.

The risks that define the thesis

- It’s a commodity, not a franchise. Earnings swing on the sulphur–acid spread, which Amal cannot control. FY26 proved the pricing power isn’t there.

- The margin was cyclical. Anchoring on FY25’s 32% (or the 44.5% quarter) overstates normalised earnings badly.

- Working capital has turned. The elegant negative-working-capital model flipped to +62 days, halving cash conversion.

- Specialty pivot unproven. H-Acid and agro-intermediates are the only real re-rating path and they’re early, sub-scale, and up against giants.

- Parent-satellite dynamics. Clean and safe, but value tends to accrue to the group, not to Amal’s minority holders. Institutions’ near-total absence is the market voting on exactly this.

- Watch the Ankleshwar disposal gain — likely to flatter a coming P&L with something non-recurring. Strip it before you believe it.

None of this makes Amal a bad company. It’s a clean, well-run, debt-free survivor of a genuine near-death turnaround, and the Lalbhai stewardship is a real asset. But there’s a difference between a good company and a good investment, and at 34x trailing earnings anchored on a fading commodity spike, the price is asking you to believe a specialty-margin story that FY26 just declined to deliver. The number that matters isn’t the 77% revenue line. It’s the 15% margin, heading down.

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Yesterday, the Prime Minister announced a six-member task force under Nandan Nilekani to make India’s exams “leak-proof.” The day before that, the Education Minister resigned. Before that: 2.27 million NEET aspirants sat an exam on 3rd May that was cancelled nine days later, a retest on 21st June, 47 NTA officials sacked, Delhi Metro stations shut for four days, and a Bill in Parliament proposing fines up to ₹10 crore and jail terms of 5–7 years.

Everyone is writing the outrage piece. The politics piece. The “trust deficit” piece.

I run factories. When something keeps happening despite everyone wanting it to stop, I don’t look at intentions. I look at incentives. So today, let’s do something nobody in the mainstream coverage is doing:

Let’s treat the paper leak mafia as a business, and audit it.

Because that’s what it is. It has suppliers, distributors, pricing tiers, customer acquisition, and margins. And I’ll tell you upfront where this article lands: it is one of the highest-ROCE businesses operating in India today, and the new Bill — for all its 10-year sentences — attacks the P&L in exactly the wrong place.

1. Market sizing: the demand side is not what you think

Start with the funnel.

•⁠ ⁠23 lakh NEET-UG aspirants every year, chasing roughly 1.1 lakh MBBS seats.

•⁠ ⁠Of those, government seats — the ones where a middle-class family can actually afford the degree — are roughly half.

•⁠ ⁠The rest are private and deemed universities, where the all-in cost of an MBBS through management/NRI quota routinely runs ₹1 crore to ₹1.5 crore+, paid legally, in white (mostly), with a receipt.

Read that last line again, because it is the single most important number in this entire story.

India already has a legal, functioning market where a medical seat trades at ₹1–1.5 crore. The management quota is the “list price” of a doctor’s career for anyone who can’t crack the merit route.

Now: what does a leaked NEET paper reportedly sell for? In the 2024 Bihar arrests, candidates confessed to paying ₹30–40 lakh. Various 2026 reports put tier-one pricing in a similar band.

So the leaked paper is not competing with ₹2 lakh of Kota coaching fees. It is competing with a ₹1.5 crore management quota seat. The leak is an arbitrage product: pay ₹40 lakh, get merit-route pricing on a management-quota outcome, and save ₹1 crore.

Once you see that, the demand side stops being mysterious. Any product that saves a motivated, liquid buyer ₹1 crore will always find customers. You could not design a better value proposition in a B-school classroom.

Estimated addressable demand (my numbers, assumptions flagged): if even 0.5% of 23 lakh aspirants come from families with both the liquidity (₹30 lakh+) and the willingness, that’s ~11,500 potential buyers per cycle. At an average ticket of ₹30 lakh, that’s a theoretical TAM of ₹3,000+ crore per exam cycle — for one exam. Add JEE, state PSCs, teacher recruitment exams, banking exams, and constable recruitments (which leak far more often than NEET, just with smaller tickets), and you’re looking at an informal industry plausibly in the *thousands of crores annually*. Nobody audits it. Nobody can. That’s the point.

2. The supply chain: a logistics business wearing a crime costume

Strip away the drama and a paper leak is a logistics and access business. The “raw material” — one question paper — has to be acquired from exactly one of a handful of choke points:

Choke point A: The printing press. Papers for national exams are printed at a small number of confidential presses. One insider with a phone camera is the entire capex of this business.

Choke point B: Transit and storage. Papers move by truck and courier to district strongrooms, sometimes sitting in bank lockers or school safes for days. In the 2024 case, investigators traced the leak to papers in transit. Every extra day between printing and exam is inventory sitting in a warehouse with weak security. Any FMCG operator will tell you: shrinkage happens in the godown, not the factory.

Choke point C: The exam centre. The morning-of leak — a centre superintendent opening a seal 90 minutes early for a “solver gang” sitting in a back room with WhatsApp.

Here’s the operator’s observation: the entire national examination system is a single-batch manufacturing run with zero redundancy. One paper, printed once, distributed physically to thousands of locations, opened simultaneously. If any single node in that chain is compromised, the whole batch is contaminated — and there is no way to recall the product. It is the exact opposite of how you’d design a system where the product’s entire value is confidentiality.

The mafia didn’t build anything clever. They just found the weakest node in a chain the state built for them.

3. The P&L: why this beats every startup pitch in my inbox

Let me do what I do to every founder who pitches me — a blunt unit-economics table. Illustrative numbers, based on what arrests and chargesheets have revealed over the years:

Revenue (one leak, one exam):

•⁠ ⁠200–400 paying candidates × ₹20–40 lakh average = ₹40–160 crore

•⁠ ⁠(Tiered pricing: full paper in advance is premium; answer key on exam morning is the economy SKU; some gangs even collect post-dated cheques and blank stamp papers as receivables security. Yes — this business has working capital discipline.)

Costs:

•⁠ ⁠Insider payoff at press/transit/centre: ₹50 lakh – ₹2 crore

•⁠ ⁠Solver gang (MBBS students/junior doctors who solve the paper overnight): ₹5–10 lakh per solver

•⁠ ⁠Safe houses, transport, burner logistics: ₹1–2 crore

•⁠ ⁠Distribution commission to local agents/coaching touts: 10–20% of collections

Total cost stack: maybe ₹10–25 crore against ₹40–160 crore of revenue.

That’s a 60–85% EBITDA margin on near-zero capital employed. ROCE is effectively infinite. Cash conversion cycle: negative (they collect advances). Customer acquisition cost: near zero, because desperate demand walks in through coaching-ecosystem referrals.

I have reviewed dozens of startup decks this year as an angel. Not one — not one — has unit economics within shouting distance of this. The only “startup” in India with better margins than a paper leak gang is another paper leak gang.

4. Now audit the deterrent: the ₹10 crore fine is priced wrong

The new Bill raises fines to ₹10 crore and minimum jail to 5 years (7 for organised crime), with a Special Task Force to close investigations in 2 months.

Sounds tough. Now run the expected-value math the way the gang’s CFO would (and make no mistake, these operations have someone doing exactly this):

Expected penalty = Probability of conviction × Penalty.

The penalty went up. But the probability? India has seen paper leak cases across UP, Bihar, Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Haryana for two decades. Ask yourself: how many kingpins — not the ₹5 lakh centre superintendent, the actual principals — have completed a full sentence? The historical conviction record in these cases is so thin that even a ₹10 crore fine, discounted by a low single-digit conviction probability and 8–12 years of trial timelines, prices out at a rounding error against ₹100 crore of revenue.

You don’t kill a 70%-margin business by raising a fine it never expects to pay. That’s like trying to stop smuggling by increasing the customs duty. The fine is not a deterrent; it’s a theoretical line item in a risk register nobody reads.

Fast-track courts and the 2-month investigation clock are the only genuinely dangerous provisions in the Bill for the mafia — because they attack the probability term, not the penalty term. Watch whether those actually get staffed and funded. That’s the tell.

5. What would actually kill this business (the operator’s answer)

If I were asked to shut this industry down the way I’d shut down a competitor, I’d attack the three things every business needs: its arbitrage, its supply chain, and its inventory.

Kill the arbitrage: expand seat supply. As long as 23 lakh students chase 1.1 lakh seats and a legal seat trades at ₹1.5 crore, someone will sell a ₹40 lakh shortcut. Every new government medical college compresses the arbitrage spread. This is the slowest lever, but it is the only one that attacks demand. Everything else is supply-side whack-a-mole.

Kill the single batch: computer-based, multi-form testing. The government has already signalled NEET moves to CBT next year. Done properly — large calibrated question banks, randomised forms per candidate, multiple sittings — there is no longer “a paper” to steal. You cannot leak inventory that doesn’t exist until the candidate clicks Start. JEE has run this way for years; note carefully that the big scandals keep hitting the paper-based exams. That is not a coincidence. That is a controlled experiment the country has been running for a decade, and nobody read the results.

Kill the inventory dwell time. Where paper must persist, the fix is boring supply-chain hygiene: print closer to exam date, encrypt-and-print at the centre (papers transmitted digitally, printed on-site inside a sealed window), tamper-evident tracking on every packet. This is cold-chain logistics thinking. A vaccine that breaks temperature is discarded; a paper packet whose seal-time doesn’t match the log should void that centre automatically. Make contamination detectable and localised instead of invisible and systemic.

The Nilekani task force — Nilekani plus a former ISRO chief, a former IB director, and the IIT Madras director — is, on paper, exactly the right skills mix for levers two and three: identity, authentication, secure delivery. Aadhaar-grade biometric authentication at centres alone would gut the solver-gang and impersonation segment of the market.

What the task force cannot fix is lever one. Seat supply is a fiscal and political question, not a technological one. So my forecast, stated plainly: the leak business as we know it — the stolen physical paper — dies within 3–4 years if CBT is executed properly. The demand doesn’t die. It migrates — to admission fraud, document forgery, and manipulation further down the funnel, where the tickets are smaller but the enforcement is even weaker. The arbitrage always finds a channel.

The bottom line

For sixty-seven years my family has operated in commodity markets, and the first law of commodities is this: wherever a price spread exists and enforcement is weak, a trade will occur. It doesn’t matter whether the commodity is rice bran or a question paper.

India’s exam crisis is not a morality failure. It’s a market structure failure — a ₹1 crore arbitrage spread, a single-point-of-failure supply chain, and a deterrent priced at a fraction of the margin it’s supposed to deter. The students on the streets understood this instinctively, even if they’d never phrase it this way. They weren’t just protesting a leak. They were protesting the fact that merit was trading at a discount to money — openly, at a published market price.

The Nilekani committee can fix the plumbing. Only seat supply fixes the market.

Until then, the best business in India will keep running. No GST number. No audit. No competition.

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Assumptions and estimates in Sections 1 and 3 are mine, built from publicly reported arrest records and chargesheet disclosures across the 2024 and 2026 cases; ranges are deliberately wide. If you have better data, my inbox is open — I’ll publish corrections the way I always do.

If this made you see a news story differently, that’s the whole point of Old Money New Code — operator’s numbers on India’s biggest stories, every week. Subscribe free. Forward this to one person who has a NEET aspirant at home. They’ll understand it better than any of us.

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Negotiation is one of those skills that everyone thinks they have and almost nobody has actually developed.

It is not a personality trait. It is not about being aggressive or charming or naturally persuasive. It is a skill — built through repetition, through losing deals you should have won, through winning deals you nearly walked away from, through years of sitting across tables and phone calls and WhatsApp messages and eventually developing a feel for how these things actually move.

I have been negotiating commodity deals — purchases, sales, logistics contracts, banking terms, JV structures — every single day for sixteen years. Across three continents. In markets as different from each other as India, Nigeria, and Vietnam.

Here is what I have actually learned. Six principles. None of them from a book. All of them from experience.

Principle One — Never Negotiate Yourself

This is the one that surprises people most. And it is the one I wish someone had told me at the beginning.

Owners and founders are almost always the worst negotiators for their own deals.

Here is why. When an owner sits down to negotiate, they have an agenda beyond the negotiation itself. They want to close this and move to the next thing. They have four other things they should be doing. They are mentally already in the next meeting. Their patience — the single most important resource in any negotiation — is already depleted before the conversation begins.

And the person on the other side of the table knows this. They can feel it. The slight impatience. The willingness to concede a point that could have held. The relief when agreement is reached.

They take advantage of it. Every time. Not maliciously — just rationally. If the other person wants to close, you make them close on your terms.

The solution is simple and counterintuitive: let someone else negotiate for you. A trusted employee, a procurement manager, a sales head — someone whose only job in that room is the negotiation itself, with no other agenda pulling at them. Someone who can sit with an offer on the table, say nothing, and let the silence do its work.

Reserve the owner’s presence for the close — when the relationship needs to be affirmed, when a final concession needs to be signalled at the right level. But the negotiation itself? Send someone who has nothing else to think about.

Principle Two — Patience Is The Entire Game

Every negotiation is, at its core, a test of whose patience runs out first.

Nobody wants to lose a deal. The supplier does not want to lose your business. The buyer does not want to lose your product. The contractor does not want to lose the contract. That mutual desire to close is the energy that runs through every negotiation — and the person who can manage their relationship with that energy most patiently almost always wins.

Leave an offer on the table and walk away. Not dramatically — just move on to other things, signal that you have options, give the other side time to sit with the gap between where you are and where they need to be. More often than not, they come back. And when they come back, they come back closer to you.

But here is the nuance that most people miss: who moves first matters enormously.

Who makes the first phone call after a meeting? Who sends the follow-up message? Who blinks? Where is the meeting held — in your office, on your ground, where you are psychologically at home? Or in theirs, where the power dynamic subtly shifts?

These details are not trivial. They are the texture of negotiation, the micro-signals that experienced negotiators read and inexperienced ones do not notice. The person who reaches out first has shown they care more. The person who hosts on their ground has a structural advantage. Neither of these is decisive alone — but they accumulate. Over a long negotiation, they add up.

Principle Three — Know The Market Before You Know Their Offer

This is the mistake I see most often, and it costs people real money every time.

The supplier quotes you one hundred rupees. You counter at eighty. You feel like you have negotiated.

But what if the actual market rate is forty rupees, and one hundred was simply what they decided to open with? You have just anchored your entire negotiation to their number — not to reality. You have negotiated them down from a fiction to a slightly smaller fiction, and you have done it while thinking you were being shrewd.

The informed negotiator does not start from the other person’s quote. They start from their own understanding of what the product or service actually costs in the market. What are others paying? What is the floor? What is the realistic range?

Walk into every negotiation knowing the market before you know their offer. Then the offer becomes just a starting position — not a reference point, not an anchor, not a number that shapes your thinking. Just a number they said.

Principle Four — Negotiate Everything, Not Just The Price

Price is what everyone negotiates. It is also, frequently, the least important part of what is being agreed.

The terms and conditions. The payment schedule. The logistics responsibility. The packaging specifications. The warranty. The after-sale service. The exact product specifications. The delivery timeline. Which party bears which risk if something goes wrong in transit.

All of these have value. All of these have cost. And all of these can be structured in ways that more than offset a price concession — or that make a price premium completely justified.

Let me be specific.

If you are selling, and the buyer pushes hard on price — give a little on price and take it back on terms. Shorter credit period. Buyer bears logistics from port. No returns after delivery. Specifications locked at signing. Every one of those adjustments has a real value that the buyer may not be calculating as carefully as they are calculating the headline price.

If you are buying, the same applies in reverse. Pay slightly more and take better terms. Longer credit period. Seller responsible for quality on delivery. Extended warranty. Five-year service agreement included.

The best negotiators I have encountered rarely fight hardest on price. They fight hardest on the full shape of the deal — and they know what each element is worth.

An uninformed negotiator says “I want a TV.”

An informed negotiator says “I want this specific TV, this brand, this panel type, this size, this warranty period, this brightness, these contrast ratios, delivered by this date, with this return policy.”

Two different negotiations. Two very different outcomes.

Principle Five — Make An Offer Too Good To Refuse. But Not How You Think.

Everyone thinks an irresistible offer means the lowest price or the highest discount.

It rarely does.

The truly irresistible offer is the one that removes the other person’s biggest headache. That takes a pain point they have been managing and makes it disappear. That bundles something of genuine value to them — something that costs you very little to provide but solves a problem they have been living with.

Here is the principle: the value of what you bundle is not determined by what it costs you. It is determined by what it is worth to them.

A commodity supplier who offers to handle all export documentation — the phytosanitary certificates, the fumigation certificates, the bank document coordination — at no extra charge is offering something that costs them almost nothing (they have the systems already) but saves the buyer an enormous administrative headache. That bundled service is worth a price premium that a straightforward commodity comparison would never support.

Find the headache. Remove it. Price accordingly.

And shift the conversation away from price entirely. When the buyer is focused on “what else am I getting,” they are not focused on “why is this rupee higher than the competitor.” That is exactly where you want them.

Principle Six — Do The Payment Terms Maths. Most People Don’t.

This is the most technically specific principle, and I think it is the most underappreciated one.

Most negotiations treat payment terms as a secondary consideration — something to agree after the price is settled. This is a mistake.

Payment terms are themselves a financial instrument. And the maths of payment terms, done properly, changes everything about how you negotiate them.

Here is the calculation.

Bank lending rates in India are currently around nine to ten percent per annum. Unsecured open market rates are around fifteen to eighteen percent. So the cost of money, depending on how you access it, is somewhere in that range.

Now — if you are buying something and you pay one month in advance rather than on delivery, and the seller gives you a three percent discount in exchange for the advance payment:

Three percent for one month = three percent × twelve months = thirty-six percent annualised return on that decision.

Thirty-six percent. On a capital deployment decision that took thirty seconds to negotiate.

If the credit period is two months and the discount is three percent, the annualised return is three percent × six (since you are giving up two months of credit) = eighteen percent. Still better than your cost of funds.

The point is: do the annualised maths. Do not evaluate payment terms in isolation. Compare the discount available for early or advance payment to your actual cost of funds — what you would pay to borrow that money for that period. When the discount exceeds your cost of funds, take the discount. When it does not, take the credit.

Most people never do this calculation. They accept whatever payment terms are on the table and focus all their energy on the headline price. Meanwhile, the payment terms are quietly worth more or less than the price concession they fought so hard for.

Principle Seven — Never Negotiate With Friends And Family. Seriously.

This one is specific to the Indian business context but I suspect it resonates far beyond it.

When a friend or family member is on the other side of a deal, the negotiation is already compromised before it begins.

Here is how it always goes. They say: “Why are we negotiating? It’s all in the family. Same pocket, different pocket — what’s the difference?” And because you do not want to seem petty, because you do not want to damage the relationship, because the social pressure of the moment is real — you agree. You skip the negotiation. You trust that it will work out.

Then the bill arrives. A month later. Two months later. And it is higher than the market rate. Because the negotiation that should have happened at the beginning did not happen — and now you are paying for the privilege of having trusted someone who had no incentive to be competitive because the relationship was supposed to take care of everything.

There are two solutions, and I have tried both.

The cleaner solution is simply not to do business with friends and family. Keep those relationships in their own lane, separate from commerce entirely. The friendship is worth more than the deal.

If you must do business with them — and sometimes you must, because the relationship brings a real advantage — do not manage it yourself. Put someone from your organisation between you and them. Let the negotiation happen at a professional level, between professionals, with the personal relationship held separately and consciously apart from the commercial one.

The relationship can be present at the table. It should not close the deal. Those are two very different things.

A Word On Personal Relationships In Negotiation

While we are here — let me address something I feel is significantly overstated in how people talk about sales and negotiation.

“Business happens on personal terms.” “Relationships close deals.” “People buy from people they like.”

I do not deny any of this entirely. Relationships matter. A prior relationship with someone gets you in the room faster, gets your calls returned, gets you the benefit of the doubt in a close contest.

But I think the importance of personal relationships in negotiation is enormously overemphasised. And I think it leads people to invest in the wrong things.

At the end of every negotiation, everyone is asking the same question: what do I get from this? What are my objectives — profit, long-term relationship, market access, influence, reputation? And whatever those objectives are, the deal either serves them or it does not.

A personal relationship might influence the margin of that decision. It rarely determines it. The person who gives you a deal that works against their interests because they like you personally is rare to the point of being commercially irrelevant.

Your relationship should open the door. Your terms should close the deal. Never confuse the two — and never rely on a relationship to do the work that your offer should be doing.

The One Thing That Works Everywhere

India. Nigeria. Vietnam. Three completely different negotiating cultures, as I wrote about a few weeks ago.

But underneath all the cultural differences — the patience game works everywhere.

In every culture, nobody wants to lose a deal. In every culture, the person who needs the deal more is at a disadvantage. In every culture, silence after an offer is more powerful than an immediate counter.

The tactics differ. The gift-giving norms differ. The directness of how a rejection is communicated differs enormously. But the fundamental dynamic — two parties with asymmetric information and asymmetric need, trying to find a number they can both live with — is the same everywhere.

Master the patience. Everything else is local knowledge that you pick up over time.

Before You Go — One Request

If this piece gave you something useful — forward it to one person who is about to walk into a negotiation. The payment terms calculation alone might save them real money.

And if you are reading this as a forwarded piece — this is what every Friday looks like. Practical, honest, no frameworks named after Greek letters.

Subscribe below. Takes ten seconds. Next Friday we are talking about something I have never discussed publicly — what it actually feels like to be a third-generation business person carrying a legacy, and the specific fear that keeps me up at night about what happens to Hemraj after me.

Subscribe now

— Rishi

P.S. The next time someone quotes you a price, resist the urge to counter immediately. Sit with it. Let the silence work. See what happens.

P.P.S. Do the annualised payment terms maths. Seriously. Right now, on the next deal you are working on. You will be surprised what you find.

On 11 May 2026, Paradeep Phosphates Limited reported the best financial year in its forty-four-year history. Revenue of ₹21,826 crore, up 29%. Profit after tax of ₹996.84 crore, up 52%. EBITDA of ₹2,259 crore, up 33%. A dividend of ₹1.50 per share. An unmodified audit opinion from BSR & Co. LLP.

The stock rose about 6% the next session.

In the same set of accounts, net cash used in operating activities was ₹1,011.86 crore. The prior year, the company had generated ₹1,647.86 crore from operations.

That is a swing of roughly ₹2,660 crore in the wrong direction, in the year of record profit.

Both facts are true. Both are audited. Neither is hidden — the cash flow statement is a mandatory disclosure and sat in the same filing as the headline. But one of them made every news summary and the other made almost none.

This piece is an attempt to read the whole filing rather than the press release. It is not investment advice, and there is no view here on what the stock is worth. It is an exercise in the older discipline: when a business reports profit, ask where the cash went.

1. The business, briefly

Paradeep Phosphates manufactures non-urea phosphatic fertilisers — DAP and a range of NPK grades — sold under the Jai Kisaan Navratna and Navratna brands. Post-merger it operates roughly 3.7 million MT of annual fertiliser capacity across three sites: Paradeep in Odisha, Zuari Nagar in Goa, and Mangalore in Karnataka.

The corporate history matters for reading the accounts. Incorporated in 1981 as a joint venture between the Government of India and the Republic of Nauru, it became a wholly-owned government enterprise in 1993, and was disinvested in February 2002. It listed in May 2022 through a ₹1,500 crore IPO priced at ₹39–42 per share, part of which funded the acquisition of the Goa plant from Zuari.

The promoter structure is the single most important structural fact about this company, and I will return to it.

2. The cash flow gap, decomposed

A fertiliser company’s cash flow is not like a normal manufacturer’s. Two features distort it:

Subsidy timing. Under the Nutrient Based Subsidy regime, a large share of realisation comes from the Government of India rather than the farmer. The company sells the bag, books the revenue, and then waits for the subsidy. The wait is the business risk.

Seasonality. Kharif and Rabi cycles mean inventory builds ahead of demand and receivables spike after it. A single year-end snapshot can mislead.

So the question is not “was cash flow negative” but “why, and does the balance sheet corroborate the innocent explanation.”

Here is the balance sheet movement, standalone, year on year:

Inventory and receivables together absorbed ₹3,794 crore of cash. Current borrowings rose ₹1,846 crore and the cash balance fell ₹571 crore — together ₹2,417 crore of funding. Profit contributed the rest.

This is the whole story of FY26 in one paragraph: the company borrowed and drew down cash to fund a working capital build roughly four times its net profit.

Now, the honest counter-argument. The MCFL merger added a balance sheet. Part of that inventory and receivable increase is simply Mangalore’s assets arriving on the books, not organic deterioration. That is real and it matters.

But it doesn’t fully account for the gap, for a reason I will come to in section 4.

3. Revenue grew 29%. Receivables grew 56%. Inventory grew 81%.

This is the ratio that does the most work in any forensic read, and it is the one that requires the least sophistication to compute.

When receivables grow materially faster than revenue, one of a small number of things is happening: collections have slowed, credit terms have loosened, revenue has been recognised earlier in the cycle, or the counterparty has stopped paying on time. In a subsidy-driven fertiliser business, the fourth explanation is usually the right one, and it is not the company’s fault — but it is still the company’s problem.

Inventory growing at 81% against 29% revenue growth is the more interesting number. Management framed inventory positioning as deliberate — on the post-results call of 13 May 2026, they indicated inventory levels remain adequate for Q1 FY27, and analysts noted gross margins expanded 480 bps in Q4 supported by strategic raw material sourcing and inventory management.

That framing is coherent. Buying raw material ahead of a rising price curve is a legitimate strategy and it demonstrably helped margins. PL Capital’s note observed the company increased sulphuric acid capacity to 2 mmtpa from 1.4 mmtpa in FY26 and is on track to double phosphoric acid capacity to 1 mmtpa by early FY29.

But a strategy that works is still a strategy that consumes cash, and it introduces a risk that doesn’t appear anywhere in the P&L: if phosphate and ammonia prices fall, that ₹4,627 crore of inventory gets written down. The margin expansion of FY26 and the write-down risk of FY27 are the same decision viewed at two points in time.

Worth watching in the FY26 annual report notes: the inventory valuation policy, any provision for slow-moving or obsolete stock, and the split between raw materials, work-in-progress and finished goods. A build concentrated in raw materials reads differently from a build concentrated in finished goods that didn’t sell.

4. The merger arithmetic nobody adjusted for

Here is where the headline growth rate stops meaning what it appears to mean.

Mangalore Chemicals & Fertilizers merged into Paradeep Phosphates with an appointed date of 1 April 2024 and an effective date of 16 October 2025. The scheme became effective roughly eighteen months after the date from which it is accounted.

Under common-control accounting for amalgamations, that gap requires retrospective restatement of comparatives. The FY25 figures you are comparing FY26 against are not the FY25 figures that were reported in FY25.

The disclosed effect: the merger accounting added ₹1,852 crore to FY26 revenue and ₹174 crore to FY26 pre-tax profit.

Strip that out and the picture changes shape. Pre-tax profit on a like-for-like basis moved from ₹753 crore to ₹1,154 crore — still a genuine and substantial improvement of roughly 53%, driven by real operating gains. The underlying business did improve. That is not in dispute.

But the ₹1,852 crore of revenue and ₹174 crore of PBT that arrived via consolidation are not organic growth, and the 29% revenue headline blends the two without distinction. An investor comparing PPL’s 29% to a peer’s organic growth rate is not comparing like with like.

The transaction terms, for completeness: MCFL shareholders received 187 PPL shares for every 100 MCFL shares. A separate share transfer occurred at ₹144.00 per share, aggregating ₹418.14 crore in cash consideration. Zuari Agro Chemicals reduced its MCFL stake from 54.03% to 29.53% via an off-market sale of 2,90,37,000 shares on 13 October 2025.

The forensic question the public filings don’t fully answer: what was the purchase price allocation? How much of MCFL’s consideration was assigned to identifiable assets versus goodwill or capital reserve? Under common-control accounting the answer may be that no goodwill arises at all — but the treatment materially affects both the reported equity and future depreciation. The FY26 annual report notes are where this lives, and it is the first thing I would read.

5. The interest line is the tell

Finance cost in Q4 FY26 reached ₹156.17 crore — the highest quarterly figure in the company’s history, up 23.01% sequentially.

For most companies, interest cost is a financing decision. For a subsidy-dependent fertiliser company, interest cost is a proxy for how much money the government owes you. Thecompany sells, waits for subsidy disbursement, and borrows to bridge the gap. The size of the bridge shows up as finance cost.

The company said as much itself, years ago and more plainly than it does now. In the Q2 FY23 release, management attributed the increase in finance costs to higher outstanding subsidies and currency volatility.

That mechanism has not changed. What has changed is the scale: current borrowings of ₹6,056.52 crore against equity of ₹6,782.66 crore.

The coverage consequence is where this gets uncomfortable. Operating profit to interest coverage fell to 2.83 times in Q4 FY26 — the lowest quarterly reading on record — against a multi-period average EBIT-to-interest coverage of 3.24 times.

Set against that: ICRA upgraded the company’s ratings on 27 January 2026 across instruments worth ₹17,500 crore, and management has spoken about targeting an AA−(stable) rating. A rating agency with full access to the books, including the subsidy receivable ageing that public investors cannot see, took a more benign view than the coverage ratio alone implies. That is meaningful evidence and it deserves weight.

Both things are true simultaneously. The coverage ratio is deteriorating and the rating is improving. The reconciliation is almost certainly that ICRA views the receivable as sovereign credit rather than commercial credit — which is defensible, since the counterparty is the Government of India, and it has always eventually paid.

“Eventually” is doing a great deal of work in that sentence.

6. Related parties: the structure hiding in plain sight

PPL is majority-held by Zuari Maroc Phosphates Private Limited (ZMPPL), a 50:50 joint venture between Zuari Agro Chemicals (Adventz group) and OCP S.A. of Morocco. ZMPPL holds approximately 56%.

OCP is not a passive financial partner. It is one of the world’s largest phosphate producers, with control over a very large share of global known phosphate rock reserves.

So the company’s controlling shareholder is also, structurally, positioned in its raw material supply chain. That is simultaneously the company’s greatest competitive advantage and its most significant related-party governance question.

The advantage is obvious: secured access to phosphate rock and phosphoric acid in amarket where supply is concentrated and geopolitically sensitive.

The question is equally obvious and rarely asked aloud: on what terms? Is phosphoric acid purchased from OCP-affiliated entities at arm’s length? What is the annual quantum? How does contract pricing compare to spot benchmarks? A company buying its principal raw material from an entity that controls it has, in principle, a mechanism by which margin can be located in one jurisdiction rather than another.

I want to be precise here, because this is where forensic writing goes wrong. I am not alleging anything. There is no public evidence of improper related-party pricing at PPL, the accounts carry an unmodified audit opinion, and the audit committee has issued its certifications. Related-party transactions are disclosed in the notes as required, and the structure was fully visible at IPO.

What I am saying is that the related-party note is the single highest-value page in this annual report, and almost nobody reads it. The relevant disclosures to examine: the quantum of purchases from OCP and Maroc Phosphore entities, the pricing basis, and any transactions with Adventz-group companies. The MCFL merger itself involved a related party — MCFL was 54.03% held by Zuari Agro, and MCFL had separately acquired an SSP plant at Mahad from Zuari Agro for ₹72.75 crore, disclosed as a related-party deal.

None of this is improper. All of it means the standard of disclosure scrutiny should be higher than for a company with dispersed ownership, not lower.

7. The seizure that appeared once and vanished

On 24 January 2026, PPL disclosed receipt of a seizure memo from the Customs Department covering 25,000 MT of technical grade urea valued at ₹103.30 crore, following allegations of Biuret content violations in imported goods intended for NPK manufacture. The company contested the testing methodology and sought provisional release while pursuing legal recourse.

I could find no meaningful follow-up coverage.

₹103.30 crore is roughly 10% of FY26 net profit. Whether it eventually flows through as a loss, a provision, a contingent liability, or nothing at all depends on litigation this article cannot predict. But it belongs in any complete picture of the year, and the contingent liabilities note in the FY26 annual report is where its current status will be recorded.

This is a small illustration of a general point: material information routinely enters the public domain through a single regulatory filing and then disappears, because no journalist has an incentive to follow a story with no resolution date.

8. Ratios, assembled

Standalone FY26 unless noted:

The gap between trailing ROE (~18.4%) and three-year average ROE (~13.2%) is worth sitting with. It tells you FY26 was an unusually good year against the company’s own recent history, which is precisely when mean-reversion risk is highest and when investors are least inclined to think about it.

9. Price history, and what it reveals about the market’s confusion

The stock’s twelve months tell a story of violent disagreement:

• 52-week high: ₹234.05, hit after Q1 FY26 results when the stock surged 17.5% in a

  session on a 60% PAT jump

• Trading around ₹78 in April 2026, ahead of Q4 results — a decline of roughly two-thirds from the high

• ₹127.30 on 12 May 2026, post-results, up 3.83% but still ~45.6% below the high

• ₹130.20 intraday shortly after, up 6.20%

• Around ₹136–140 by late June / early July 2026

Market capitalisation in the ₹12,900–14,500 crore range across that period.

A stock that trades from ₹234 to ₹78 and back to ₹136 inside a year is not being valued — it is being argued about. The bull case (backward integration, merger scale, NPK premiumisation) and the bear case (working capital, leverage, subsidy dependence) are both fully visible in the same filings, and the price is oscillating between them.

Analyst positioning as of May 2026 was measured rather than enthusiastic: PL Capital carried an “Accumulate” with a target of ₹141 — above the then-price, but not dramatically.

10. What management is building, and what it costs

The forward story is coherent and worth stating fairly, because a forensic read that only finds problems is not a forensic read.

Backward integration. Sulphuric acid capacity rose to 2 mmtpa from 1.4 mmtpa during FY26, via new plants at Paradeep (500,000 MTPA) and Mangalore (100,000 MTPA).Phosphoric acid capacity is targeted to double to 1 mmtpa by early FY29, at which point the company expects full backward integration. Management has indicated incremental EBITDA of approximately ₹350 crore in FY27 from the Mangalore expansions and sulphuric acid cost savings.

Volume and mix. FY26 production volumes grew 8% to 36.66 LMT; sales volumes rose 10% to 42.10 LMT. NPK including TSP grew 22% to 24.64 LMT — a genuine mix shift toward higher-margin product. All existing capacities operated at full utilisation during FY26.

Further capacity. A 1 mmtpa granulation expansion and debottlenecking at Paradeep is expected to drive volume growth from H2 FY27.

Capex. Management guided normal FY27 capex of around ₹600 crore. On the Goa energy efficiency project, completed in Q4, management cited an efficiency improvement from a6.4 baseline.

Read against section 2, the tension is straightforward: a company funding a multi-yearbackward integration programme through a period of sharply negative operating cash flow is running two capital demands at once. If FY27 operating cash flow reverts to positive —which it plausibly does if the working capital build was genuinely one-off merger-and-inventory-strategy — the programme is comfortably financed. If it does not, the ₹600 crore capex and the ₹6,057 crore current borrowing compete for the same balance sheet.

11. Reading list: what to check in the FY26 annual report

For anyone who wants to verify rather than take my word:

1. Subsidy receivable ageing. How much of the ₹4,790 crore trade receivable is government subsidy, and how old? This is the single most important number not in the results press release.

2. Purchase price allocation for MCFL. Goodwill, capital reserve, or neither. Depreciation consequences.

3. Inventory composition and provisioning. Raw material vs finished goods split; any obsolescence provision against the ₹4,627 crore.

4. Related-party note. Quantum and pricing basis of OCP-affiliated purchases; Adventz-group transactions.

5. Contingent liabilities. Status of the ₹103.30 crore customs matter; any subsidy disputes.

6. Borrowing schedule. Tenor and interest rate on the ₹6,057 crore; how much is short-term working capital versus term debt.

7. Capitalised interest. Whether borrowing cost on the phosphoric acid and sulphuric acid projects is being capitalised, and how much.

The point

Paradeep Phosphates had a genuinely good FY26. Volumes grew, mix improved, backward integration advanced, a merger closed, and profit hit a record. None of that is manufactured.

It also consumed ₹1,012 crore of operating cash, added ₹1,846 crore of short-term debt,saw interest coverage fall to its lowest recorded level, and grew receivables and inventory at roughly twice and nearly three times the rate of revenue.

Both descriptions come from the same audited filing. The first one made the headlines. The second one is in the cash flow statement, three pages later.

There is no conclusion here about what the shares are worth, and this is not a recommendation to do anything. The older principle applies and is enough: profit is an opinion, cash is a fact, and the distance between them is where the actual information lives.

Sources: PPL audited standalone and consolidated results FY26 (11 May 2026, audited by BSR & Co. LLP, unmodified opinion); Q4 FY26 earnings call (13 May 2026); NCLT sanction orders and scheme filings for the MCFL amalgamation; CCI order of July 2024; PPL Red Herring Prospectus (2022); ICRA rating action, 27 January 2026; company regulatory disclosures under SEBI LODR Regulation 30; PL Capital Q4 FY26 result update.

Nothing in this article is investment advice. I hold no position and have no relationship with the company. All figures are as reported in public filings and may be superseded by subsequent disclosure. Readers should consult the full annual report and a registered adviser.

Everyone romanticises the leap.

The resignation post. The founder photo. The “building something of my own” caption.

Nobody talks about the boring months before the leap — the ones that actually decide whether you survive.

Here’s the truth most first-time founders learn too late: your last few months inside a job are the most valuable months your startup will ever get. You’re still being paid. The pressure is off. And almost everything that doesn’t need your full-time attention can quietly get done — while the salary still lands in your account.

The founders who quit smart don’t jump into an empty room. They jump onto a platform they’ve spent a year building on the side. So before you hand in that resignation, sort these seven out.

1. Build it for 1–2 years before you quit — nights and weekends

The riskiest thing you can do is quit first and figure it out later.

Do it the other way around. Spend a year, ideally two, building the venture on the side — while the salary still lands. Test the idea with real market study, real customer conversations, real surveys. And then the acid test: get actual pre-orders. Not “pilots,” not polite interest. Money on the table before you’ve quit anything.

One stranger parting with real cash tells you more than a hundred people saying “great idea.” A market that pays is a fact. A market you imagine is a story. Find out which one you have while you still have a paycheck to fall back on.

2. Know your real runway — not your hope runway

Before you quit, do the math honestly. Not “I have some savings.” A number. And then a smaller, honest number.

Say your monthly personal expenditure is ₹2 lakh — rent, EMIs, school fees, the household. And you’ve saved ₹50 lakh. On paper, that’s 25 months of runway. Feels comfortable, right?

Now cut it. Everything costs more and takes longer than your spreadsheet believes. Shave 30% off — roughly 7 months gone — and your real runway isn’t 25 months. It’s 18.

That changes everything. It means you must start generating income from the venture within 18 months, not 25. Cross that line and you’re not running a startup — you’re burning personal savings to stay alive, and every decision after that is made in panic.

Also fund the venture properly. If you think the project needs ₹100 to build, don’t start with ₹100 — start with ₹120–130. Things overrun. The founder who budgeted exactly ₹100 dies at ₹105. Build the cushion in before you begin.

3. Have the money conversation at home — out loud — before you resign

This is the one nobody puts on a checklist. It’s the one that ends marriages and startups both.

Your spouse, your parents, whoever shares your financial and emotional bandwidth — they need to know, in plain words, what you’re about to do to the family cash flow and the family calendar. Not a vague “I’m starting something.” An honest, “for the next two years, income drops, stress rises, and I’ll be less present.”

Because a startup is like a baby — it needs your full time, full energy, full attention. If the people at home aren’t genuinely on board, you’re not building a venture — you’re fighting a second war on another front. Have this conversation before you quit, not after. The venture is hard enough with support at home. It’s nearly impossible without it.

4. Lock in your co-founder before you leave — and have them join on day one

Even the gods didn’t hand everything to one deity. Saraswati has knowledge. Lakshmi has wealth. Hanuman has strength. Each carries what the other doesn’t.

So it’s not humility — it’s arithmetic. No single human has every trait a venture needs. Find a co-founder who covers what you lack: if you’re the operator, find the builder; if you’re the visionary, find the closer. And choose just as hard for the bond — because if the startup is your child, your co-founder is your spouse, and you’ll be in the trenches together long after it stops being fun.

But here’s the part people miss: fix this before you quit. Your co-founder likely has a notice period too. So coordinate it — resign around the same window, so the day you join full-time, they join full-time too. Don’t quit alone and spend three months waiting for your partner to be free. Walk in together, ready.

And while you’re still employed, write down the boring clarity: who owns what, who decides what. Decision-making should not overlap — every domain needs one person whose call is final. Set that rule in calm, in writing, before the first real disagreement tests it.

5. Have the plan, the deck, and the legal entity ready — before day one

Here’s the mindset that changes everything: anything that doesn’t need full-time attention should already be done while you’re still being paid.

The business plan. The pitch deck. The registered legal entity. The bank account. Basic compliances. None of this needs you full-time — all of it can move on nights and weekends. Do it now, and you’ve effectively banked three or four months of work while your employer was still funding your life.

So on the day you finally quit, you don’t start from a blank page. You start from a company that already exists, a plan already written, a deck ready to send. That head start is free — but only if you take it before you leave.

6. Line up your first hires — so they join when you do

This is the most underrated move on the list.

Great people take two, three, four months to find. And once you find them, they have notice periods to serve. If you quit first and then start hiring, you’ll spend your most fragile early months alone, doing everything, waiting for a team that arrives a quarter too late.

Do it in reverse. While you’re still employed, identify your first few critical hires. Get them excited, get them committed, and get them to resign and serve their notice periods on a timeline that matches yours. The goal: the very day you join full-time, your co-founder and your first team join too. You don’t trickle in. You arrive as a unit, ready to run from hour one.

7. Decide your walk-away line — before you start

This is the hardest one, and the one ego refuses to let you plan for. So plan for it now, while you’re still calm and still salaried.

Before you quit, write down two numbers: what winning looks like, and the line at which you shut it down and walk out. Not to be pessimistic — to be sober.

Because the real danger isn’t a failed startup. It’s a dying startup that you keep feeding — pouring in more money, more years, more of your family’s security — because your ego won’t let you stop, and you keep hoping “something will click.” A founder with no pre-set exit line becomes a hostage to sunk cost. A founder who set the line in advance can make a clean, unemotional call when the data says so.

Know your number for winning. Know your number for stopping. Decide both now — because you won’t be calm when it actually matters.

One important caveat — do this the honest way

All of this side work happens on your time — nights, weekends, leave days. Never on company time.

This is not moonlighting. It should never come at the expense of the job you’re still being paid to do. As long as you draw that salary, that job gets your full effort, your full output, your full integrity — exactly what’s expected of you, with nothing sacrificed. You don’t cut corners at work to build your startup. You cut into your own rest instead.

Build your future on your own hours. Never on your employer’s. That’s not just ethics — it’s the discipline that proves you’re ready to run your own thing in the first place.

The one line to remember

The leap is not the brave part.

The brave part is the year before — building on the side, testing with real pre-orders, locking your co-founder and your first hires, getting the plan and the entity done while the salary still lands. Do all of that, and quitting isn’t a leap into the dark. It’s just switching on an engine you’ve already built.

Sort the boring things first. Then quit.

If this was useful, forward it to the one person you know who’s about to quit their job. They need it more than they’ll admit.

Let me start with something that will either make you nod slowly or make you deeply anxious.

My phone is on silent. Always. Not on Do Not Disturb with exceptions. Not on silent during meetings and normal the rest of the time. Permanently, completely, all-day silent.

No ting. No buzz. No notification pulling my eyes to the screen every forty-five seconds. When someone calls, I see it if I look at my phone. When a message arrives, it waits. Cold calls, marketing calls, the relentless incoming traffic of a business phone — all of it sits quietly until I choose to engage with it.

I call back the people I want to call back. Everyone else can send a text and I will respond when I am ready.

This is not a digital detox. This is not a productivity hack I read about in a book. It is simply the way I have chosen to move through my day — in control of my own attention rather than at the mercy of whoever decides to ping me next.

And it gives me, genuinely, an enormous amount of peace.

That is the surprising thing I promised you last week. Not a supplement stack or a morning routine or a breathwork protocol. A phone on silent. Sometimes the simplest thing is the most radical.

First — An Honest Acknowledgement

Before I tell you what I do well, let me tell you what I do not do well enough.

I need to lose fifteen kilograms. I know this. I have known this. I keep saying I will start working out consistently, and I keep finding reasons why today is not quite the right day to begin.

My diet is actually not bad — more on that in a moment. But exercise? That is the gap. The thing I know matters, know I should prioritise, and have not yet fully cracked.

I say this not for sympathy but for honesty. Because I think there is something deeply unhelpful about wellness content from people who pretend they have everything figured out. I do not have everything figured out. I am thirty-eight years old, running multiple businesses simultaneously, and there is one area of my health where I am still more intention than action.

Now you know. Let’s move on.

The Morning — What Actually Happens

I wake up between seven and eight. No alarm-induced panic, no five AM hustle culture performance. Seven to eight, naturally, when the body is ready.

The first thing — before chai, before email, before anything — is water with lemon juice, ginger juice, a pinch of salt, and inulin powder. This combination, every morning, has become as automatic as breathing.

Then dry fruits. Half a bowl — soaked almonds, two walnuts, one cashew, one date, one fig, one apricot. All soaked the previous night. The soaking matters — it changes how the body absorbs what is in them.

Breakfast is fruit. A full plate of three or four different kinds, whatever is in season. No toast, no eggs, no heavy morning meal. Just fruit, which the body processes cleanly and which sets a certain tone for the rest of the day.

Midday — something liquid. Sugarcane juice, coconut water, something that hydrates and gives energy without the heaviness of a meal.

Lunch is normal home food. Roti, dal, vegetables, sabzi. The foundation. Cooked well, eaten without guilt, not the elaborate performance that “healthy eating” sometimes becomes in wellness circles.

Four o’clock — fruits again, or a light snack. Something to carry through to the evening without arriving at dinner ravenous.

Dinner is minimal. Two rotis, vegetables. Light. The body does not need to be working hard at digestion when it should be preparing for rest.

Tea happens when it happens. I do not drink coffee — never developed the taste for it, never felt the need.

Meditation — And Why I Want To Be Honest About What It Actually Is

I meditate for fifteen to twenty minutes every day.

But I want to be clear about something, because I think there is a lot of noise around meditation that makes people feel like they are failing if they are not achieving some transcendent state.

Chanting a mantra ten times is not meditation. Reading that again — chanting a mantra ten times is not meditation. It is a ritual, and rituals have their own value, but they are not the same thing.

Meditation is a technique. It requires learning. It requires practice. It requires sitting with discomfort — the restless mind, the wandering attention, the impulse to check the phone — and returning, again and again, to whatever anchor you are using. Breath. Mantra. Stillness.

I do it every day. Some days it works better than others. Some days the mind is quieter. Some days it is busy and I sit with the busyness anyway.

What it gives me — consistently, over time — is a quality of attention that is harder to describe than to experience. A slight slowing down. A relationship with my own thoughts that is observational rather than reactive. The ability to sit with a difficult decision rather than being driven by the urgency of the moment.

For someone running multiple businesses, managing multiple geographies, building something new while maintaining something old — that quality of attention is not a luxury. It is an operational necessity.

When Everything Gets Too Much

I want to talk about this honestly, because I think it is important and because not enough people in business do.

Everything I am doing is stressful. Hemraj, GAPB, the investments, the show, the newsletter, the podcast — the mental load is real and it is constant. There are days when the saturation is complete. When the brain simply will not process one more thing. When the thought of opening one more message or making one more decision feels genuinely impossible.

I have learned to recognise this feeling. And I have learned not to fight it.

When saturation arrives — I switch off. Completely and without guilt.

Sometimes that means shutting the laptop and sleeping. Not a twenty-minute power nap with an alarm — actual sleep, for as long as the body needs.

Sometimes it means a couple of days of genuine vacation. Not working vacation, not “checking emails by the pool” vacation. Actual disconnection. Different environment, different people, different conversations.

I travel two to three times a month, partly for business but also partly because travel does something to the nervous system that nothing else quite replicates. A different city, a different airport, a different hotel room — the change of environment forces a reset that sitting in your regular office simply cannot. The familiar surroundings carry the weight of all your familiar problems. New surroundings do not — at least not for a few days.

And through all of it — the phone stays silent.

The Phone On Silent — Why It Actually Matters

I want to come back to this because I think it is more profound than it sounds.

Most people’s relationship with their phone is fundamentally reactive. The phone makes a sound, and they respond. The phone demands attention, and they give it. Their attention — the most finite and valuable resource they have — is distributed according to whoever happens to message them next, in whatever order the notifications arrive.

A cold caller from a bank has the same claim on your attention as your most important client, because both produce a notification that sounds the same.

I decided, at some point, that this was not how I wanted to operate.

My phone on silent means I am never interrupted. It means a conversation I am in gets my full attention rather than half of it. It means a decision I am thinking through gets unbroken thought rather than fragmented thought with seventeen pings between ideas. It means the people I am with — in a meeting, at a meal, in a conversation that matters — get me, not me-while-also-managing-my-phone.

I see missed calls when I look at my phone. I respond when I am ready. The people who matter know this about me and work with it. The people who do not know it send a message, which I see and respond to in my own time.

Has it cost me anything? Perhaps occasionally — a call I missed that mattered. But far less than the alternative costs. The alternative is a life lived in constant response to other people’s priorities rather than your own.

I choose my own.

The Thing I Am Still Working On

Fifteen kilograms. Consistent exercise. I know.

The honest truth is that the diet is doing more work than it should because the exercise is not pulling its weight alongside it. And I know — as anyone who has read even a little about longevity and cognitive function knows — that physical exercise is not separable from mental sharpness. They are the same system.

I am not going to tell you I have a plan that starts Monday. I have said that before. What I will say is that it is the one thing I am not yet doing well, and I am saying it publicly because accountability has a way of eventually working where intention alone does not.

Maybe this is my accountability moment.

We will see what Friday 17’s version of me looks like in the Friday 34 update.

The Underlying Philosophy

Here is what ties all of this together, and I think it is the most important thing I want to say.

Happiness is the goal. Not productivity. Not output. Not the number of businesses running simultaneously or the size of the portfolio or the metrics on the newsletter.

Happiness.

Everything I have described — the morning routine, the meditation, the travel, the phone on silent, the ability to switch off without guilt — all of it is in service of arriving at the end of each day feeling like a human being rather than a machine that processes inputs and produces outputs.

The businesses exist to fund a life. They are not the life. And the moment they start consuming the life entirely — the health, the peace, the relationships, the ability to simply sit quietly with a cup of chai and be present — they have stopped being instruments and started being masters.

I refuse to be mastered by what I built.

Before You Go — One Request

If this resonated — forward it to one person who is running on empty right now. Someone who is sacrificing everything for their work and has forgotten that the work is supposed to serve them, not the other way around.

And if you are reading this as a forwarded piece — this is what every Friday looks like. Honest, personal, no performance.

Subscribe below. Takes ten seconds. Next Friday we are talking about negotiation — specifically, what sixteen years of commodity trading across three continents has taught me about how deals actually get done.

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— Rishi

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P.S. Put your phone on silent. Not for a day. Permanently. See what happens to your attention, your peace, and your relationships. You can thank me later. 📵☕

P.P.S. The fifteen kilograms will happen. Probably. Definitely. Watch this space. 😄

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A school dropout starts in a 200-square-metre shed in Hyderabad with a second-hand CNC machine. Seventeen years later his company makes turbine blades that GE, Siemens, Mitsubishi, Rolls-Royce and Baker Hughes cannot easily buy from anyone else on earth. The order book sits at roughly ₹6,000 crore — about thirteen times last year’s revenue. The stock has done what those numbers deserve.

And yet: over the last six years, Azad Engineering has reported cumulative net profit of nearly ₹280 crore and generated barely half that in operating cash. Two of those years, cash flow was outright negative while profits grew.

That’s the tension this issue is about. Not because it’s a scandal — it isn’t. But because it’s exactly the kind of thing that separates a great business from a great stock, and it’s the sort of detail that gets waved away in the excitement of a Sachin-Tendulkar-backed, Rolls-Royce-supplying growth story. Let’s read the filings properly.

Snapshot

The multiple is the first thing that should make you sit up. You are paying roughly ninety times earnings. Everything below is really an inquiry into whether that’s madness or foresight.

The promoter: the best part of the story

Rakesh Chopdar failed Class 10 and started working in his father’s nut-and-bolt workshop at sixteen. No degree, no engineering pedigree, no inherited customer book. He taught himself precision machining, reinvested every rupee into Japanese and German machines, and — this is the part that matters — cracked GE’s AS9100 qualification when Indian precision manufacturing barely existed at that tier.

That first GE contract was the whole game. In this industry a qualification is a trust signal: once GE certifies you for a life-critical rotating part, Mitsubishi and Siemens will talk to you, because the hard, multi-year, zero-defect vetting has been done. Chopdar turned one qualification into partnerships with five of the seven major aerospace players and the three OEMs — GE, Siemens, Mitsubishi — who between them control roughly 70% of the turbine world.

I’ve spent sixteen years in a very different industry, but I know a real moat when I read one, and this is real. It isn’t a brand or a patent. It’s the fact that a customer whose turbine blade failing means a grid going down does not switch suppliers to save 8%. Switching cost here is measured in lives and liability, not rupees.

On governance the flags are mild. Promoter holding sits around 55.8% — healthy skin in the game. Chopdar sold ₹170 crore in the IPO OFS, which is normal founder liquidity after a lifetime building the thing, not a dump. The bigger dilution came from the institutional side (more on that below). No auditor changes I could find, no qualified opinions, related-party transactions look ordinary. The one thing I’d keep a quiet eye on is key-man risk: this is very much one man’s technical vision and OEM relationships, and the annual report itself talks about “building the human capital foundation” — which is management-speak for we need a bench.

Shareholding: who got in, and who’s diluting

Promoters ~55.8%, FIIs ~14.8%, DIIs ~11.7%, public ~17.7% as of March 2026. The direction of travel matters more than the snapshot: institutions have been building positions, which is the validation you’d expect for a scarce, hard-to-replicate franchise.

But notice the pre-IPO cap table. Piramal Structured Credit and DMI Finance were selling ₹280 crore and ₹50 crore respectively in the OFS — private credit taking its exit as the company went public. That’s fine and normal, but it tells you the earlier growth was part-funded by structured debt, not internal accruals. Which connects directly to the cash-flow story.

Sachin Tendulkar as an investor gets the headlines. Ignore it for analysis. It’s brand visibility, not a fundamental input. Nice to have him on the register; it tells you nothing about the blades.

The business and the moat

Azad makes precision-forged and machined rotating components — blades, aerofoils, and now hybrid turbo-gas generator engine parts — for four end-markets: energy (turbines), aerospace and defence, oil and gas, and standalone power supply. Some parts carry a zero parts-per-million defect requirement. Read that again. Not low-defect. Zero.

The competitive advantage stacks in layers. There’s the qualification moat already described. There’s the customer-specific plant model — Azad builds dedicated lean facilities aligned to a single OEM, which deepens the relationship and raises switching cost further. There are 45-plus qualified manufacturing processes and 1,700-plus qualified parts as of end-2025, each one a small barrier a competitor would have to re-clear. And there’s timing: the world is short of gas-turbine capacity, nearly half the turbines under construction globally are hydrogen-ready, and dispatchable gas power turns out to be indispensable even in a renewables build-out. Azad sits inside that supply chain at a point almost nobody can enter.

So the margin — a genuinely excellent ~37% EBITDA — isn’t an accident. It’s what you earn when the customer cannot easily replace you and the part cannot fail.

The forensic section: where the excitement meets the balance sheet

Here’s the discipline. A 37% margin and a ₹6,000 crore order book will make anyone want to fall in love. The filings ask you to slow down.

Profit and cash have been walking apart. Look at the chart. FY23 and FY24 both showed negative operating cash flow while the P&L showed growing profit. FY25 cash flow turned positive (₹62.9 crore) and FY26 came in around ₹54 crore — but against FY26 profit of ₹132 crore, the company converted well under half its earnings into operating cash. Over six years the cumulative gap is stark.

Why? Not fraud — the reasons are visible and explainable, which is exactly why this is worth understanding rather than fearing. Three things:

One, the working-capital cycle is long and getting longer at the wrong moments. Export receivables run on 120–180 day credit terms — you make a life-critical part for a German or Japanese giant, you wait up to six months to get paid. Receivable days were 154 in FY24, up from 138. Inventory sat at 183 days, up from 150, because customised alloys with minimum-order quantities have to be bought and held long before serial production earns anything back. Net working capital rose to ₹331 crore in FY25. This is structural to the business model, not a one-off — a scarce-supplier franchise that finances its customers’ inventory and waits half a year for payment.

Two, development spend is being capitalised. The company capitalises new-product development “in line with its policy.” That’s legitimate under accounting rules and common in this industry — but it means some cost that could be expensed is instead sitting on the balance sheet, which flatters current profit relative to current cash. It’s not a trick; it is something to keep honest about when you’re paying ninety times earnings. A rupee of capitalised-development profit is not the same quality as a rupee of cash collected.

Three, growth itself eats cash. Azad has commissioned four dedicated customer plants since listing. FY26 capitalised assets were ₹392 crore; FY27 capex guidance is ₹180–190 crore. When you’re building capacity ahead of a ₹6,000 crore order book, free cash flow is supposed to be negative — you’re investing. The question is whether the returns show up when the capex cycle matures.

How the cash gap got funded: dilution and debt. Negative free cash flow has to be paid for somehow. The IPO fresh issue, subsequent institutional money, and structured credit filled it. Debt/equity is a comfortable ~0.19x now precisely because equity was raised. That’s a reasonable way to fund a genuine growth franchise — but as a shareholder you should know your slice was diluted to build the runway, and the promise is that future cash conversion pays you back.

Tax and the rest, briefly, because they’re clean. Effective tax looks ordinary — no suspicious sub-statutory rate propping up profit. Other income isn’t carrying the operating result; the EBITDA is real operating EBITDA. No contingent-liability landmine jumped out of the notes, though as always with an export-heavy manufacturer I’d read the forex and guarantee disclosures each year. Interest coverage and debt-to-cash-accrual ratios improved sharply after the raise.

Net of all this: the accounting is honest, but the economics are cash-hungry, and the valuation assumes that hunger reverses into strong free cash flow as plants mature and working capital normalises. That is the bet. Not hidden. Just easy to overlook.

Industry outlook

The tailwind is unusually clean. Gas-turbine capacity is short globally, two-thirds of what’s under construction is in Asia, and dispatchable gas remains structurally necessary alongside renewables. Aerospace is in a multi-year up-cycle. Defence indigenisation in India adds a domestic leg (HAL, BHEL, DRDO, Rafael relationships). The end-market concentration among a handful of OEMs cuts both ways — it’s a moat because they can’t easily replace Azad, and a risk because losing or disappointing even one of GE/Siemens/Mitsubishi would matter a lot.

Management guides to 25%+ growth for FY27 and targets inventory-day improvement (200 in H1, 160–170 in H2). Worth marking that target and checking it next year — because inventory normalisation is precisely the lever that would close the cash-conversion gap.

Guidance vs. delivery

Credit where due: this management has broadly delivered. FY26 was called a year of “consolidation and stabilisation,” and they did commission capacity while growing revenue 30%+ and profit ~49%. They’ve hit their growth numbers consistently since listing. The order book is contracted, not aspirational — Mitsubishi phase-2 alone added ₹1,387 crore. When the guidance is “25%+ growth,” this is a team with a track record of meeting it. The open item isn’t top-line delivery; it’s the working-capital and cash-conversion promise, which is newer and unproven at scale.

Valuation: what ₹2,275 is actually assuming

At ~90x trailing earnings, the market is not paying for FY26. It’s paying for FY30. Reverse the logic: to grow into a, say, 40x multiple in four years without the stock falling, earnings need to roughly compound at ~25%+ and — crucially — start converting to cash. The order book makes the revenue plausible. The margin is already there. The single variable that isn’t yet proven is cash conversion.

So the valuation isn’t obviously mad. It’s a high-conviction price on a genuinely scarce asset. But it leaves no room for disappointment: a couple of quarters of stretched receivables, one OEM pushing out a schedule, or working capital refusing to normalise, and a 90x stock re-rates hard. You’re buying an excellent business at a price that has already assumed excellence continues uninterrupted.

The risks that would break the thesis

•⁠ ⁠Cash conversion doesn’t improve. If receivable and inventory days stay elevated as revenue scales, the free-cash-flow story never arrives and the multiple can’t be justified.

•⁠ ⁠Customer concentration. A handful of OEMs drive the book; losing standing with even one is material.

•⁠ ⁠Key-man dependence. The franchise is deeply tied to Chopdar’s technical relationships; the management bench is still being built.

•⁠ ⁠Valuation air. At 90x, the stock prices in flawless execution. Any stumble is amplified.

•⁠ ⁠Capitalised development. Reported profit is somewhat flattered by capitalised dev spend; watch that the returns justify it.

None of these are reasons the business is bad. It’s a wonderful business. They’re the reasons the stock at this price is a different question from the company, and why I’d want to see two or three quarters of genuine working-capital normalisation before believing the cash finally follows the profit.

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Personal research, not investment advice. Not SEBI-registered. Educational only.

I shipped my first export container over sixteen years ago. Since then, my businesses have moved commodities to buyers across Africa, Southeast Asia, and beyond — and along the way I’ve made most of the mistakes a new exporter can make, so you don’t have to.

People imagine exporting is for large companies with big teams and bigger budgets. It isn’t. Some of the most profitable export businesses in India are two-person operations running out of a small office. What separates the ones who build lasting export businesses from the ones who quit after one bad shipment is not capital — it’s process.

So here is the checklist. Ten steps, in the order I would follow them if I were starting from zero today.

Step 1: Select Your Exact Product and Market — Using Data, Not Instinct

Most first-time exporters pick a product because a cousin trades in it, or a market because they have a friend there. That is how you end up with a container nobody wants.

The Government of India has already done the homework for you, free of cost. Three portals are your starting point:

Trade Connect ePlatform (trade.gov.in) — DGFT’s one-stop platform launched precisely to help new exporters. It has a Tariff Explorer showing you exactly which products get duty benefits under which Free Trade Agreement, country and product guides for market access and compliance, buyer directories, a global trade events calendar, and even free training modules under EXIM Paathshaala. If you use only one website, use this.

Niryat portal (niryat.gov.in) — India’s official export data, sliced by product, country, and even district. You can see exactly what India exports where, in what volumes, and how the trend is moving. This tells you where demand already exists.

Indian Trade Portal (indiantradeportal.in)— run by FIEO, this lets you search any HS code and instantly see the tariff your product faces in each market, preferential rates under FTAs, RoDTEP and duty drawback rates, and the import policy conditions of target countries.

Pay special attention to the new FTAs. India has signed agreements with the UAE (CEPA), Australia (ECTA), EFTA countries, and more recent partners — each one lists product lines where Indian goods now enter at zero or reduced duty while competitors pay full tariff. That duty differential is a ready-made price advantage. The Tariff Explorer on Trade Connect will show you, product by product, where you hold this edge.

Select the product-market combination where three things intersect: existing Indian export momentum, an FTA advantage, and something you can genuinely source or make well. Only then move to Step 2.

Step 2: Write to the Indian Embassy — They Are Your Free Business Development Team

This is the step almost nobody uses, and it’s the one I recommend the most.

Every Indian Mission abroad has a commercial wing whose job is to promote Indian exports into that country. Write to the commercial representative at the Indian Embassy or High Commission in your target market, introduce your company and product, and request a list of credible, established importers of your product category.

Two things happen. First, you receive a vetted list — importers known to the Mission, not random names scraped off the internet, which dramatically reduces your risk of dealing with fraudulent buyers. Second, an introduction that comes through the Embassy channel carries weight. You are no longer a cold email; you are a referred Indian supplier.

The Missions have become genuinely proactive on this — their trade-promotion role has been formally enhanced, and they are now integrated into the Trade Connect ePlatform, so you can reach them digitally as well. In my experience, they respond, and they help. Use them.

Step 3: Get on a Plane. Carry Samples.

Here is a hard truth: nobody worth doing business with will take you seriously over email alone.

Your target importer receives dozens of approaches from Indian suppliers every month. Most are traders with no product, no factory, and no staying power — and the importer knows it. The single fastest way to separate yourself from that noise is to travel to the country and sit across the table from the buyer.

And do not go empty-handed. Carry:

•⁠ ⁠Actual product samples — not photographs, the physical product they can touch, test, and send to their lab

•⁠ ⁠Professional brochures and product literature — specifications, grades, packing options

•⁠ ⁠Videos and photographs of your manufacturing process — the plant, the quality-control steps, the loading of containers

•⁠ ⁠Your certifications and documentation — ready to hand over, not “I’ll send it later”

A face-to-face meeting with samples achieves in one hour what six months of emails cannot: it proves you are real, you are serious, and you have invested in the relationship. Buyers commit to people they have met. That first trip is not a cost — it is the highest-return investment you will make in your export business.

Step 4: Work the Trade Shows — But With a Plan, Not a Wander

Every product on earth has its marquee gathering. Food has Gulfood in Dubai and SIAL in Paris. Each industry has its equivalent — an annual expo where the entire global buying community assembles under one roof.

You must be there. But understand this: walking the aisles randomly adds almost no value. The exhibitors are busy, the good buyers have full calendars, and you will come home with a bag of brochures and nothing else.

Do it properly instead:

Before the show: Get the exhibitor and visitor lists. Research which companies matter for your product. Shortlist the importers, distributors, and even competitors you want to meet. Email them two to four weeks in advance and lock meetings into their calendar.

At the show: Those pre-set meetings are your goldmine — and not just for orders. Ask about the market. What is the current demand? Who is supplying? What are the prices doing? What problems are they facing with their current Indian suppliers — quality inconsistency, delayed shipments, documentation errors? Every complaint you hear about a competitor is a differentiator you can build into your own offering.

When you’re ready, take a stall. A small booth changes your status from visitor to participant. And here is the part most people don’t know: the government will pay for a large part of it. Under the Market Access Initiative (MAI) scheme, exporters with turnover under ₹50 crore who participate through their Export Promotion Council get roughly two-thirds of the stall/participation cost subsidised, plus economy airfare reimbursement of up to ₹75,000 (₹1.25 lakh for events in Africa and the Americas). You can avail this for multiple events a year. The new Export Promotion Mission (Niryat Disha) has expanded market-access support further. Check with your product’s Export Promotion Council — membership plus twelve months of filings is typically all it takes to qualify.

Your first two or three shows may produce zero orders. That is normal. You are building recognition — buyers commit to suppliers they have seen show up year after year.

Step 5: Do Not Export Until Your Quality Is Boringly, Repeatably Consistent

This step is a gate, not a suggestion. If you cannot pass it, do not enter the export market yet.

Whether you manufacture yourself or outsource production as a merchant exporter, one rule is absolute: the buyer must receive the same quality every single time, without exception. One good shipment followed by one bad shipment doesn’t halve your business — it ends it. International buyers have long memories and short patience, and a quality claim on the other side of an ocean is expensive, humiliating, and usually unrecoverable.

So before your first container moves:

•⁠ ⁠Written specifications for every product and grade you offer — the exact parameters, tolerances, and testing methods

•⁠ ⁠Documented QC processes — who checks what, at which stage, against which standard, with records kept

•⁠ ⁠Pre-shipment inspection — your own or third-party, every shipment, no exceptions

•⁠ ⁠If you outsource manufacturing: your quality control must extend into the vendor’s factory. Their process is your reputation. If you cannot control it, do not ship it.

And understand the economics of this game: nobody builds wealth in exports from one transaction or one season. The money is made across dozens of repeat orders over years, from buyers who stopped checking your containers because you never once gave them a reason to. Consistency is the brand. Consistency is the compounding.

Step 6: Engineer Your Logistics Cost — This Is Where Margins Are Won and Lost

Two identical exporters with identical products can have completely different profitability, purely on logistics. Your landed cost at the buyer’s port is what you compete on, so every rupee saved in freight is a rupee of pricing arbitrage.

Your product moves one of two ways — *by air or by sea* — and the difference is enormous in both cost and transit time. Air is fast and expensive; sea is slow and cheap. Which one suits you depends on your cargo’s volume, weight, density, value, shelf life, packaging, and the buyer’s urgency.

For sea freight — which is where most goods move — know your options:

•⁠ ⁠FCL (Full Container Load): You book the entire container, 20-foot or 40-foot. Best per-unit rate once you have the volume to fill it. Note that heavy, dense cargo often maxes out a 20-footer on weight before space, while light, voluminous cargo wants the 40-footer.

•⁠ ⁠LCL (Less than Container Load): You don’t have a full container’s worth? You share one. The consolidator combines cargo from multiple exporters into a single container and charges you only for the space/weight you use — this is the technical term for what I call “taking a small piece of the container.” Perfect for first shipments, samples-at-scale, and testing a new market without betting big.

•⁠ ⁠Chartering bulk vessels or barges: exists for commodity-scale volumes — but I’d advise a first-time exporter firmly against it. Start small. Ship LCL or single containers, learn the market’s real behaviour, build your systems, and scale from there.

Get quotes from multiple freight forwarders for every shipment, understand your Incoterms, and treat freight negotiation with the same seriousness as your selling price — because to the buyer, they are the same number.

Step 7: Get the Payment Terms Right — This Is Where New Exporters Get Burned

The deal is not the price. The deal is the price plus how you get paid. Get this wrong and everything else on this list is irrelevant.

There are three main routes, and I’ll rank them the way I’d advise a new exporter:

1. Letter of Credit at sight — the safest, and my strong recommendation for your first shipments. The buyer’s bank commits to pay you the moment you present compliant shipping documents. Insist on a confirmed LC — meaning a bank in India adds its own guarantee on top of the foreign bank’s — so even if the buyer’s bank or country runs into trouble, you still get paid. Yes, LCs cost a little more in bank charges. Pay it. It is the cheapest insurance you will ever buy.

2. DP (Documents against Payment) — the middle path. Your documents travel through banking channels, and the buyer’s bank releases them only after the buyer pays. The buyer cannot take delivery of your cargo without the documents, so your goods are protected. The risk: if the buyer refuses the cargo altogether, your container is sitting at a foreign port and you must find a new buyer or ship it back.

3. TT (Telegraphic Transfer) — pure trust. The buyer wires money directly, and documents move outside bank control. TT in advance is wonderful — you have the money before the goods leave. TT after shipment means your cargo and your payment both depend entirely on the buyer’s honesty. Reserve this for relationships tested over years, never for a new buyer, no matter how good the price looks.

The pattern in export fraud is always the same: a new exporter, an attractive price, and loose payment terms. Don’t be that story.

Step 8: Draft the Contract Like a Pessimist

When the relationship is good, nobody reads the contract. The contract exists for the day the relationship isn’t good. So draft it assuming that day will come.

Your sale contract must clearly specify:

•⁠ ⁠Complete deal terms — product, specifications, grade, quantity with tolerance, price, currency, Incoterm (FOB, CFR, CIF — know exactly where your responsibility ends and the buyer’s begins), shipment window, port of loading and discharge

•⁠ ⁠Quality terms and the rebate structure — this one is critical and almost always missed. What happens if the cargo arrives slightly below specification? A pre-agreed rebate/allowance scale (so much discount per unit of deviation) turns a potential dispute into a simple calculation. Without it, every quality gap becomes a war

•⁠ ⁠The exact documents the importer needs for customs clearance at their port — certificate of origin, phytosanitary or health certificates, inspection certificates, whatever their country demands. A missing document on arrival means your cargo sits and the meter runs

•⁠ ⁠Dispute resolution and governing law — which country’s law applies, and how disputes get resolved. For agri-commodities, contracts are commonly done on GAFTA terms (the Grain and Feed Trade Association’s standard contracts with built-in arbitration); other trades have their equivalents, like FOSFA for oils and fats. These standard forms exist because they’ve been battle-tested over a century — use them rather than inventing your own

A well-drafted contract costs you a few hours upfront. A badly drafted one can cost you the entire shipment.

Step 9: Insure Every Shipment — No Exceptions

Understand what your cargo goes through: thousands of kilometres, multiple handlings, port cranes, transshipments, weather, weeks at sea. The cargo changes hands many times between your factory gate and the buyer’s warehouse, and every handling is a chance for damage, loss, or worse. Uninsured exporting is not brave; it’s reckless.

You have two broad routes:

ECGC (Export Credit Guarantee Corporation) — the government’s export insurer, covering roughly 85-90% of value. It works, but know the process going in: you submit the importer’s name and shipment details, they vet the buyer, and the cover can take time to come through — this is not a last-minute arrangement. They also offer turnover-based policies covering all your shipments for the year. Visit the ECGC office, sit with them, and understand their full product range — their buyer-risk cover is genuinely valuable for a new exporter because they effectively vet your buyer’s creditworthiness for you.

Private insurers — companies like Tata AIG, ICICI Lombard and others offer marine cargo cover, including turnover-based policies. This is what we use in our own business, because at high volumes the turnover policy is faster and administratively simpler. Take quotations from two or three insurers, compare against ECGC, and pick what fits your volume and risk profile.

Whichever route: no container of yours should ever sail uninsured. One loss on an uninsured shipment can erase a year of profit.

Step 10: Ship On Time, Document Perfectly, and Hedge Your Currency

The last step is really three disciplines that separate professionals from amateurs.

Ship within the committed window. International contracts — GAFTA and others — carry real penalties for late shipment, and buyers plan their own commitments around your dates. A delayed shipment doesn’t just cost you penalties; it tells the buyer you are not dependable, and dependability is the entire game.

Treat documentation as a profit centre, not paperwork. Hire or train a genuinely competent documentation person — this is one of the first serious hires an export business should make. Here’s why: banks scrutinise your documents against the LC terms, and every discrepancy means deductions, discrepancy fees, and payment delays. Late or faulty documents at the destination mean demurrage and detention — daily charges for containers stuck at port — which quietly devour margins. In exports, a typo is not a typo; it is money.

Hedge your forex exposure. Between contract signing and payment realisation, the rupee will move — and it can move against you by more than your entire margin. Two instruments protect you: forward contracts through your bank (you lock today’s rate for your future receivable — simple, and what most exporters use), or currency futures on the exchanges. Which suits you depends on your volumes and your banking relationship. And while you’re at it, negotiate your forex conversion margins with your bank — banks quietly take a spread on every conversion, and for a regular exporter that spread is very much negotiable.

Finally, close the loop on compliance: ensure your e-BRC (electronic Bank Realisation Certificate) is generated for every shipment — it is the official proof that your export proceeds came home, and it’s what unlocks your RoDTEP and other incentive claims — and keep every disclosure and filing with the government current. Boring? Yes. But clean compliance is what lets you sleep at night and scale without skeletons.

The Thread Running Through All Ten

Look back at the list. Not one step requires crores of capital. What every step requires is discipline — researching before selecting, meeting before selling, documenting before shipping, insuring before sailing.

Exporting rewards a very old-fashioned virtue: being the person who does what they said, at the quality they promised, on the date they committed, with the papers in order. Do that across fifty shipments and you won’t need to find buyers anymore — they will find you.

The world is buying. India has never had more tailwinds to sell — FTAs opening doors, missions abroad ready to help, subsidies covering your trade show costs, and digital platforms handing you the data. The only missing ingredient is you, doing these ten things in order.

Which step do you want me to go deeper on? Hit reply — the most-asked question becomes a future edition.

— Old Money New Code. Where legacy business sense meets the new economy.

Let me tell you what every candidate sounds like in an interview.

They know everything about everything. Every skill on the job description — they have it. Every system you mention — they have used it. Every challenge you describe — they have solved it.

Their previous boss? Completely useless. Took all the credit, contributed nothing, would have been lost without them.

Their juniors? Incompetent. Everything actually got done because of them, even though their title said supervisor, not executor.

And they are looking to leave — not because anything was wrong with them, obviously — but because the organisation simply was not growing fast enough for someone of their calibre.

Every. Single. Interview.

I have been hiring people for sixteen years. I want to tell you what I have actually learned — not the textbook version, not the HR framework version, but the real version from someone who has made most of the mistakes and is still making some of them.

With one important caveat before we start: everything I am about to say follows the 80-20 rule. What I describe is how most people behave in most situations. There are always exceptions — genuinely brilliant, honest, motivated people who defy every pattern I am about to describe. Please hold onto that caveat throughout.

The Mistake I Made Early On

When I started hiring seriously, I prioritised experience above almost everything else.

The logic seemed sound. Experience means they have done this before. They know the industry. They know the processes. You do not have to train them from scratch. They hit the ground running.

The reality, in a mid-sized organisation like ours at the time, was different.

The most experienced candidates available to us were not the cream of their industries. They were, more often than not, people at the tail end of their careers — retired or nearly retired, unable to find positions elsewhere, willing to join a smaller organisation because the larger ones had moved on without them. Or they were people who had been passed over repeatedly in their own organisations and had eventually stopped expecting more.

Experienced, technically. Motivated to drive something forward — rarely.

We promoted from within where we could — taking competent people who had grown up in the organisation and pushing more responsibility toward them. That worked better. But it had a ceiling. At some point, growth requires people who have seen things the organisation has not yet experienced.

And so the trial and error began. Hire someone. Give them three to six months. See if the person in the office matches the person in the interview. If yes — wonderful. If no — move on, without guilt, because promises made in an interview and not delivered in the role are not your obligation to sustain indefinitely.

What The Interview Cannot Tell You

Here is the fundamental problem with hiring, and I do not think it is fully solvable.

Most people lie in interviews. Not maliciously, necessarily — but they present the most optimistic possible version of their capabilities, their track record, and their intentions.

And because interviews are artificial environments — a performance, really, with both sides playing roles — it is genuinely difficult to see through the performance to the person underneath.

The probation period exists precisely because of this. Three to six months of actual work reveals more about a person than three hours of conversation ever could. The skills either show up or they do not. The attitude either holds or it changes. The motivation either sustains or it evaporates the moment the novelty of a new role wears off.

I have learned to make decisions faster within probation periods than I used to. The discomfort of ending a probation that is not working — the guilt, the awkwardness, the feeling that you are being harsh — is real. But it is considerably less expensive than the alternative: keeping someone who is not working, hoping they will improve, and watching months pass while the role remains effectively unfilled.

If the promises made in the interview are not showing up in the work — end it cleanly, professionally, and without guilt. You gave them the chance. That was your obligation.

Virtual Interviews — A Different Kind Of Problem

Five to six years ago, video interviews became standard. And they solved a real problem — suddenly you could speak to candidates from other cities without waiting months for them to travel, without the cost and logistics of bringing someone in for a conversation that might last forty-five minutes.

But they introduced a new problem.

Body language. Soft skills. The way someone carries themselves when they walk into a room, the way they respond to an unexpected question, the micro-signals that experienced interviewers read unconsciously — all of this is dramatically harder to assess through a screen.

The candidate’s internet connection drops at a convenient moment. The background is carefully curated. The hesitation that would be visible in person is hidden by the slight delay of a video call. You are making significant decisions about significant hires with meaningfully less information than you would have in a room together.

I still use video interviews — the efficiency is undeniable. But for senior hires, for roles that really matter, I always insist on at least one in-person meeting before a decision is made. The screen tells you a lot. The room tells you the rest.

What I Look For Now

Here is what has changed in how I hire over sixteen years. Specific, honest, and offered with the 80-20 caveat firmly in place.

I do not hire above forty-five.

Not because people above forty-five are less capable — that is not what I am saying. But because a hire at forty-five, in a role that requires building something, learning the organisation, earning trust, and then executing over years — the runway simply is not the same. By the time they have found their footing, retirement is approaching. For a long-term investment in a person, I need a longer horizon.

I look for good educational institutions — but not for the reason you think.

It is not that graduates of good institutions are smarter or better than others. It is that the institution has already done a screening that I cannot easily replicate. Getting into a good college in India is competitive. It requires a certain level of sustained effort, focus, and capability over years. The institution’s admission process has already filtered for some of what I need. I am using their filter, not replacing it with my own.

I watch the job-hopping pattern very carefully.

Anyone who has worked at more than four organisations across their career, or who averages less than five years per employer, is a flag for me. Not a disqualifier automatically — there are always exceptions — but a flag that requires explanation.

The person who leaves every two to three years is usually one of two things: either they are genuinely exceptional and keep getting better offers, or they have a pattern of starting well and deteriorating once the novelty wears off. The interview cannot tell you which one they are. The track record can.

I assess onboarding, training, and performance monitoring as seriously as hiring itself.

Because here is something I have learned the hard way: even a good hire in a bad onboarding environment will underperform. If you do not invest in bringing someone properly into the organisation — teaching them how things actually work, not just what their job description says — you will blame the hire for a failure that was partly yours.

KPIs. Regular reviews. Clear expectations set at the beginning, not discovered through disappointment later. These are not HR bureaucracy. They are the infrastructure that makes a hire actually work.

The Salary Band Problem Nobody Talks About

Here is one that I have not seen written about honestly, and it deserves honesty.

When you hire someone experienced from a good organisation, you pay market rate for them. Which means you pay them significantly more than people who have been with you for ten or fifteen years — people who built the organisation, who set up the systems, who trained everyone below them, who know where every body is buried.

The long-tenured people find out. They always find out.

And here is what happens — not always, but often enough to be a pattern worth naming. They do not leave. The sense of ownership, the belonging, the relationships built over years — those keep them. But what changes is something quieter and more corrosive.

They stop cooperating.

Not dramatically. Not in a way you can address directly. Just — a slight withdrawal. A reluctance to go out of their way to help the new person succeed. A “let me see if they can manage on their own” posture that, over months, makes the expensive new hire’s job significantly harder than it needed to be.

It is a non-cooperation movement. Passive, deniable, and very effective.

The solution is not to underpay new hires — that just means you cannot attract the right people. The solution is to address the salary conversation with your long-tenured people directly and honestly before the new hire arrives. Not after. Before.

Acknowledge what they have built. Acknowledge the gap. Give them a path — a real one, not a placation — toward the same level. And make it clear that the new hire’s success is also their success, because a stronger organisation means more for everyone.

It does not always work. But the alternative — hoping nobody notices — never works.

The One Thing I Would Tell Myself Fifteen Years Ago

Hire for attitude before you hire for skill.

Skills can be taught. Industry knowledge can be transferred. Processes can be documented and learned.

Attitude — the genuine desire to grow, to take ownership, to do what needs to be done without being asked — cannot be installed in someone who does not already have it.

I wasted years trying to find the motivated person inside the unmotivated hire. They were not hiding in there. The person I saw in month six was the person who had always been there.

Hire the person who wants it. Then teach them everything else.

That is the whole lesson. Sixteen years of hiring, and it comes down to that.

Before You Go — One Request

If this piece resonated — forward it to one person who is hiring right now, or thinking about building a team. The honest lessons are the ones that actually help.

And if you are reading this as a forwarded piece — this is what every Friday looks like. Raw, honest, no frameworks. Business, life, and occasionally the universe.

Subscribe below. Takes ten seconds. Next Friday we are talking about something I get asked constantly — how do you stay mentally sharp and physically healthy while running multiple businesses simultaneously? The honest answer might surprise you.

Subscribe now

— Rishi

P.S. The three to six month probation period is not a formality. It is the most important data collection period in the entire hiring process. Use it properly.

P.P.S. “Their boss was useless and their juniors were incompetent.” If you hear this in every interview — you are not alone. We all hear it. Nobody’s boss was ever useful, apparently.

I have spent 16-plus years running businesses — rice mills, solvent extraction plants, export operations across four countries. In that time I have learned one thing about opportunity: it rarely announces itself. It sits quietly in government policy documents, in supply chain gaps, in industries everyone considers “boring” — until suddenly everyone is talking about it, and by then the easy money is gone.

So today, I want to show you ten places where I believe the next crop of million-dollar (and honestly, hundred-crore) businesses will be built. Not moonshots. Not crypto. Real sectors, with real tailwinds, backed by real numbers. Most of them don’t need enormous capital to enter — they need consistency, domain depth, and the patience to build.

Let’s go.

1. Defence Manufacturing & R&D

Start with the numbers, because they are staggering. India’s defence production hit an all-time high of ₹1.78 lakh crore in FY 2025-26 — up 15.6% in a single year and more than double the ₹84,643 crore of FY 2020-21. Defence exports? A record ₹38,424 crore in FY26, a jump of nearly 63% over the previous year, reaching more than 80 countries.

Here’s the part most people miss: the private sector’s share of exports is now roughly 45%, worth over ₹17,000 crore. This is no longer a PSU-only game.

The government has set a target of ₹3 lakh crore in defence production and ₹50,000 crore in exports by 2029. Add the positive indigenisation lists (items that must be procured from Indian suppliers), the iDEX programme that has already engaged 676 startups and MSMEs with 551 development contracts signed, and draft procurement rules pushing indigenous content from 50% to 60% — and you have a structural, decade-long demand pipeline.

Where the money is: You don’t need to build missiles. Components, sub-systems, testing services, MRO, drone sub-assemblies, electronics for defence platforms — the supplier ecosystem beneath the big primes is where thousands of mid-sized fortunes will be made.

2. Space

Every serious global power dominates space. India understood this and did something remarkable — it opened the sector to private players.

The results: from a single registered space startup in 2014 to more than 400 by early 2026, with private investment crossing $600 million. India’s space economy sits at roughly $8-9 billion today and is projected to reach $44-45 billion by 2033 — a five-fold expansion — with India’s share of the global space economy targeted to rise from 2-3% to 8% by 2030.

And the government is putting demand on the table, not just policy. The Space-Based Surveillance-3 programme alone is a ₹27,000 crore project for 52 satellites — of which 31 will be built by private companies. IN-SPACe has a ₹1,000 crore venture fund, plus a ₹500 crore Technology Adoption Fund announced in 2026.

Where the money is: Satellite components, ground infrastructure, earth-observation data services, space-grade materials and testing. The picks-and-shovels layer of the space gold rush.

3. Semiconductor Design (Not Fabs — Design)

Everyone talks about fabs. I’m more interested in the fabless design side, because that is where the IP — and the margin — lives. Chip design contributes up to 50% of value addition in a semiconductor and 30-35% of global semiconductor sales flow through the fabless segment.

India already designs chips for the world — a huge share of global chip design engineering happens in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Noida for foreign companies. The shift now is toward Indian-owned IP. The government’s Design Linked Incentive (DLI) scheme reimburses up to 50% of design costs, and the results are showing: 24 supported design startups, 16 tape-outs completed, 140+ reusable IP cores developed, and ₹430 crore of venture funding already attracted. The government has publicly stated its next-phase target: at least 50 Indian fabless companies. Budget 2026-27 allocated ₹8,000 crore to the semiconductor mission — the largest single-year outlay yet.

Where the money is: Application-specific chips — surveillance SoCs, energy metering, satellite communication, RISC-V processors, edge-AI chips. Design once, license forever. This is the closest thing to building software-style economics in hardware.

4. Battery Recycling

This is my favourite kind of opportunity — a mathematically guaranteed problem with no infrastructure to solve it.

Every EV sold today produces a battery that must be dealt with 8-10 years later. NITI Aayog estimates India will generate around 128 GWh of recyclable batteries by 2030. Current operational lithium-ion recycling capacity? Roughly 2 GWh. That is a 40x gap.

The regulatory push has already arrived: the Battery Waste Management Rules mandate Extended Producer Responsibility, with formal collection targets kicking in from FY 2027-28 — meaning OEMs are legally required to pay recyclers to take their batteries. The Ministry of Mines has a ₹1,500 crore incentive scheme for critical mineral recycling. An ICEA-Accenture study pegs the potential industry at ₹31,150 crore (~$3.5 billion) by 2030. And every tonne of recovered lithium, cobalt, and nickel reduces import dependence on China, which makes this a national-security priority, not just an environmental one.

Where the money is: Collection and reverse logistics networks, black-mass processing, and — the highest-value step — refining black mass into battery-grade lithium carbonate and cobalt sulphate, which very few Indian players can do today.

5. Certified Organic Farming & Exports

The world wants clean, non-GMO, traceable food, and India is structurally positioned to supply it:

#1 globally in number of organic producers

#2 in organic agricultural land.

Yet here is the anomaly — India’s organic exports were just $666 million in FY 2024-25. APEDA’s own target is ₹20,000 crore (~$2 billion) by 2030. The gap between potential and current reality is the opportunity. Global demand for certified organic spices alone is growing over 12% annually. The domestic organic market is compounding at ~20% a year.

The catch — and the moat — is certification, grading, and traceability. Anyone can grow chemical-free produce; very few can deliver NPOP/NOP/EU-certified, properly graded, blockchain-traceable product at export scale. That last-mile trust infrastructure is where the premium sits.

Where the money is: Aggregation and certification platforms for farmer clusters, export-focused processing of organic spices, millets, and cereals, and branded organic play into the US and EU where Indian certification is already recognised.

6. Cold Chain Logistics

India’s cold chain is a story of one vegetable: the potato. Most of the country’s ~8,200 cold storages, concentrated in UP and West Bengal, are single-commodity potato warehouses. Meanwhile, roughly 30% of agricultural produce spoils before reaching consumers — post-harvest losses estimated at over ₹92,000 crore a year.

The market is already large — around $23-25 billion in 2025-26 — and growing steadily, with pharma cold chain compounding at ~13% and e-grocery demand exploding at nearly 28% annually. Yet NCCD estimates a storage shortfall in the tens of millions of tonnes, and the entire refrigerated transport fleet is barely 10,000-odd vehicles for a country of 1.4 billion people. 100% FDI is permitted; government schemes under PM Kisan SAMPADA provide capital subsidies.

Coming from agri-commodities, I can tell you first-hand: the demand for modern, multi-commodity, technology-enabled cold infrastructure — for pharma, chemicals, seafood, dairy, F&V — vastly exceeds supply, especially outside the five states that hold 70-75% of capacity.

Where the money is: Multi-purpose cold storage in underpenetrated states, reefer transport fleets, and pharma-grade GDP-compliant logistics, which commands the highest margins.

7. Electronics Component Manufacturing

India assembles phones for the world — electronics production grew six-fold from ₹1.9 lakh crore in 2014-15 to ₹11.3 lakh crore in 2024-25, and electronics is now our third-largest export category, on track to become the second-largest.

But look inside the box: 70-80% of components — PCBs, capacitors, connectors, camera modules — are still imported. We built the assembly layer; the component layer is wide open.

The government sees this clearly. The Electronics Components Manufacturing Scheme (ECMS) was launched in 2025 and its outlay was raised to ₹40,000 crore in Budget 2026-27. Already 75 projects worth ₹61,671 crore of investment have been approved, targeting everything from PCBs and Li-ion cells to camera modules and rare earth magnets. The scheme is projected to generate over ₹10 lakh crore of output over six years, feeding a national target of $500 billion in electronics production by 2030-31.

Where the money is: Bare components — passives, connectors, enclosures, heat sinks — where the technology barrier is moderate but the volumes are enormous. First movers get the incentives and the customer lock-ins.

8. Power Distribution Systems & EPC

India is committing roughly ₹9 lakh crore to power transmission and distribution by 2032 under the National Electricity Plan — to meet a projected peak demand of 458 GW, integrate renewables, and add over 1.9 lakh circuit kilometres of lines and 1,274 GVA of transformation capacity.

Nine. Lakh. Crore. And it flows through an entire value chain: transformers, cables and conductors, switchgear, substations, HVDC systems, EPC contractors, design consultants, testing services.

Better still, the opportunity is global. Transformer lead times worldwide have stretched to 24-48 months; the US alone faced an estimated 30% deficit in large power transformers in 2025. Indian manufacturers are running at full capacity serving both domestic and export demand. When supply can’t keep pace with demand for years on end, margins expand across the whole chain.

Where the money is: Transformer components (CRGO processing, bushings, tap changers), specialised EPC for substations, cable accessories, and testing/commissioning services — every layer beneath the giants is starved of capacity.

9. Specialty Chemicals

India’s specialty chemicals market is around $60-65 billion, headed toward $95 billion+ by 2030, compounding at 9-12% — significantly faster than commodity chemicals. The global market is nearing $1 trillion, and the China+1 realignment is real: global buyers are actively qualifying non-China suppliers, and India — with its process chemistry talent and cost-competitive manufacturing — is the natural beneficiary.

The economics tell the strategy: trading-led models earn 3-5% EBITDA margins, while R&D-backed niche players cross 10-15%. The specialty world is not one market — it is hundreds of micro-markets, each with distinct regulatory requirements and customer specifications. Find one niche molecule serving one niche application, master the chemistry and compliance, and you own a defensible, high-margin business that large players won’t bother attacking.

Where the money is: Niche intermediates for pharma and agro, electronic chemicals (a fast-growing gap area), green/bio-based chemistry, and import-substitution of intermediates — India still imports over 40% of chemical intermediates from China.

10. AI Advisory & AI Tools

Last, the software layer of everything above. India’s AI market is projected to exceed $17 billion by 2027, growing at 25-35% CAGR. Enterprise AI spending in India is compounding at ~34%. Deloitte finds over 80% of Indian organisations exploring autonomous agents, and 71% running more than ten GenAI experiments simultaneously.

Now here is the gap: nearly every company — in India and abroad — wants to implement AI. Very few know where to start, what to build, how to govern it, or how to measure ROI. The demand isn’t for models; it’s for implementation. Systems. Process redesign. Cost takedown. Governance and compliance.

What the Big Four did for management consulting over decades, Indian firms can do for AI implementation globally — at Indian cost structures with world-class talent. India produces more AI/data engineers than any comparable economy, and AI/ML job postings are growing 67% year-on-year. Where Industry 4.0 transformed the factory floor, AI advisory and tooling is the equivalent transformation of the office — and the consultants, integrators, and niche tool-builders will capture value long before the market consolidates.

Where the money is: Vertical-specific AI implementation (BFSI, manufacturing, healthcare), AI governance and compliance advisory, and narrow AI tools that automate one expensive, repetitive workflow exceptionally well.

The Pattern Behind All Ten

Read the list again and you’ll notice three common threads:

One — the government is underwriting the demand. Defence procurement preferences, ECMS incentives, DLI reimbursements, EPR mandates, T&D capex, the IndiaAI Mission. In each sector, policy has converted uncertainty into a visible, multi-year order book. That is rare, and it doesn’t last forever.

Two — the gap is infrastructure and trust, not technology. Batteries exist; recycling capacity doesn’t. Organic produce exists; certification systems don’t. Phones are assembled here; components aren’t made here. Whoever builds the missing middle captures the margin.

Three — none of these require a billion dollars to enter. They require domain depth, regulatory patience, and consistency. A component plant, a certification platform, a niche chemical line, an AI implementation practice — these are ₹2-50 crore starting points with ₹100-1,000 crore outcomes.

Opportunities hiding in plain sight are only invisible to people who aren’t looking. Now you’ve looked.

Which of these ten will you dig into? Hit reply and tell me — the most interesting responses will shape a deep-dive in a future edition.

— Old Money New Code. Where legacy business sense meets the new economy.

Sources: PIB (Ministry of Defence, MeitY, APEDA releases 2025-26), Economic Survey 2025-26, IN-SPACe, NITI Aayog, ICEA-Accenture, Motilal Oswal / National Electricity Plan 2032, Nasscom-BCG, Redseer, IMARC, Mordor Intelligence. All figures as reported as of mid-2026

Let me tell you something that might surprise you, given that this newsletter has spent fifteen weeks talking about DuPont analysis, commodity margins, patent defensibility, and the cost of detention and demurrage at Nigerian ports.

I believe in Vedic science. Genuinely, deeply, without apology.

And I want to tell you why — not as a leap of faith, not as a cultural inheritance I have never questioned, but as a considered position arrived at by someone who also happens to think in spreadsheets, absolute PAT numbers, and evidence-based investment theses.

Because I think the apparent contradiction between the two is not actually a contradiction at all.

First — What I Am Not Saying

Let me be clear about what this is not.

I am not telling you that I consult an astrologer before every business decision. I am not saying I would override a clear financial opportunity because of an unfavourable planetary alignment. I am not deeply, obsessively, daily-consultation-level engaged with Vedic astrology in the way some people are.

What I am saying is something more fundamental. That I believe Vedic science — astrology, numerology, Vastu, the ancient Indian frameworks for understanding the relationship between human beings and the universe — is not superstition. It is not mythology. It is not the snake-charmer, backward-looking caricature that colonial history tried to make it.

It is science. Ancient science. Science that in many cases we do not yet have the instruments or the frameworks to fully measure or prove — but science nonetheless.

And the reason I believe this is not blind faith. It is quantum physics.

The Dog In The Room

Here is an analogy I find useful.

If you are in a room with a dog, the dog can smell things you cannot. Frequencies of scent that your human nose simply cannot detect. The smell is real. The information is real. The dog is receiving and interpreting data that is genuinely present in the room.

The fact that you cannot smell it does not mean it is not there. It means your instrument — your nose — is not sensitive enough to receive it.

Now extend this.

If there are forces, frequencies, energies in the universe that influence how things unfold — and if ancient Indian civilisation, over thousands of years of careful observation, developed systems for detecting and interpreting those forces — the fact that modern Western science cannot yet fully measure or explain them does not mean they are not there.

It means our instruments are not yet sensitive enough.

The Quantum Physics Problem

Here is where it gets genuinely interesting, and where I think the most honest sceptics have to pause.

Quantum physics — the study of reality at the subatomic level, the smallest scales known to science — describes a world that is completely, fundamentally different from the physical world we experience every day.

Particles exist in all their possible states simultaneously until they are observed — at which point they collapse into a single state. The act of observation changes the outcome. Two particles, once entangled, influence each other instantaneously regardless of the distance between them — a phenomenon Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” and spent years trying to disprove, and which has since been experimentally confirmed.

The rules of quantum physics do not obey the rules of classical physics. They contradict them. They describe a reality that is, by any normal definition of the word, beyond logic. Beyond what our everyday intuition can grasp. Beyond what “common sense” would predict.

And yet — they are real. They are scientifically verified. The most rigorous, evidence-based, peer-reviewed science we have tells us that reality, at its most fundamental level, is strange beyond our comprehension.

So when someone says that Vedic science is “beyond logic” or “beyond proof” — I want to ask: compared to what? Compared to a scientific establishment that itself tells us particles can be in two places at once, that observation changes reality, that two things separated by the entire universe can influence each other instantaneously?

We are nowhere near understanding everything about everything. The assumption that we are is, as I have heard it put, perhaps the most expensive intellectual mistake we can make.

What The Sages Knew Before Anyone Went To Space

Here is something I find genuinely extraordinary, and something I think every person who dismisses Vedic science as superstition should sit with.

Thousands of years ago — centuries before any human being went to space, centuries before Galileo, centuries before modern astronomy had its instruments or its frameworks — ancient Indian sages identified nine planets in our solar system. They called them the Navagraha. Nava meaning nine. Graha meaning celestial body.

In every significant puja in the Hindu tradition, we perform the Navagraha puja — a prayer acknowledging all nine planetary bodies and their influence. This is not a recent addition to Hindu practice. It is ancient. Woven into the very fabric of how Hinduism understands the cosmos.

And they knew the earth was round.

The Sanskrit word for earth is Bhu. The word for round is Gol. Bhu-gol — literally “round earth.” This word, in this language, existed and was used to describe our planet long before the Western world had officially accepted that the earth was not flat, long before anyone had seen it from above.

They knew the earth rotates on its axis. They knew it orbits the sun. They built entire calendrical and astronomical systems — the Panchang, the Vedic calendar — on these foundations, systems accurate enough that they are still used today to determine auspicious dates and celestial events with remarkable precision.

How?

Not by accident. Not by coincidence. By systematic, rigorous, disciplined observation of the universe over generations — and by frameworks for understanding that universe that were, in their own way, as sophisticated as anything we have built since.

When I hear someone say Vedic science is superstition, I think of Bhu-gol. I think of the Navagraha. I think of the fact that what modern astronomy eventually confirmed through telescopes and space travel, the sages of ancient India had already named and mapped through a different kind of knowing.

That is not mythology. That is science with a different instrument.

Nikola Tesla And The Frequencies

Nikola Tesla — by many measures the most inventive and visionary scientific mind in human history, the man whose work underlies almost every piece of electrical infrastructure we take for granted — said something that I think about often.

He said that to understand the universe, one should think not in terms of matter, mass, or particles — but in terms of frequencies, waves, and energy.

If you start looking at the world that way — as a field of frequencies rather than a collection of objects — a great deal of what feels irrational suddenly becomes at least comprehensible.

Manifestation. The power of focused intention. The idea that the energy you put into the world comes back to you in some form. Karma.

These are not superstitions. They are — or at least, they are consistent with — a frequency-based understanding of how reality operates. The Vedic sages who developed these frameworks thousands of years ago did not have particle accelerators or quantum computers. But they were observing the same universe we are. And they developed rigorous, internally consistent frameworks for understanding it.

The fact that their instruments were different from ours does not make their observations wrong.

Karm Karte Ja. Just Keep Working.

Here is where the Vedic philosophy connects most directly to how I actually run my life and my businesses.

The Bhagavad Gita’s central teaching — perhaps the most famous line in all of Hindu philosophy — is this: do your duty. Do your work. But do not be attached to the results.

Karm karte ja. Phal ki chinta mat kar.

Do the work. Do not worry about the fruit.

I have thought about this a great deal in the context of business, and I think it is one of the most practically useful principles I have ever encountered — regardless of whether you approach it from a spiritual or a purely pragmatic angle.

Because here is what attachment to results actually does to a business person: it makes you compulsive. It makes you rush decisions that need time. It makes you cut corners to hit a target. It makes you hold on to something that should be let go of because you cannot accept the outcome. It makes you dishonest — with yourself, with your stakeholders, with the market — because you need a particular result and you start shaping reality to produce it rather than reading reality as it is.

The person who can do their work without attachment to the result — who can show up every day, make good decisions, build with care, and genuinely release the outcome to whatever forces determine these things — that person makes better decisions. Cleaner decisions. Longer-term decisions.

Every successful multi-generational business family I have encountered follows some version of this principle, whether or not they would articulate it in these terms. You get up. You do the work. You build something that is meant to outlive you. You do not obsess over whether today’s result matches today’s expectation. You trust the process, the values, the discipline — and you let the compounding do what compounding does.

This is not passive. This is not fatalism. This is the most active, disciplined, engaged way of working I know. It just comes without the anxiety of needing a specific outcome. And that absence of anxiety, it turns out, produces better outcomes.

The Basics That Are Not Optional

I do Vastu. Daily puja. The basic practices of Hindu living.

Not because I sit and consciously decide each morning that this is rational and evidence-based and justified by my intellectual framework. But because it is simply part of life. Part of how the day begins. Like breathing, like brushing your teeth, like having chai.

The rituals are not separate from the work. They are part of the same continuum. The same orientation toward living with care, with humility, with the acknowledgement that you are not the only force in the room — that there is something larger than your plans and your spreadsheets at work, and that some basic acts of acknowledgement toward that something larger are not weakness. They are wisdom.

To The Sceptics

I know some of you are reading this and thinking: this is the man who evaluates pharma CDMOs by absolute PAT, who builds cap tables through Series A to IPO, who thinks about AI governance through the lens of regulatory frameworks. How does he believe in astrology?

Here is my answer.

I believe in evidence. And the evidence I have accumulated — over forty years of living, sixteen years of running a business, watching markets, watching people, watching outcomes — includes evidence that cannot be fully explained by the frameworks I learned in business school or from management books.

Things that happened that should not have happened. Patterns that repeated in ways that probability alone cannot account for. Moments that felt, with a certainty I cannot quantify, like something other than chance.

I am thirty-eight years old. I am not asking you to share my belief. I am asking you to consider the possibility that a person can be rigorous and analytical and evidence-based — and still hold space for the parts of reality that our current instruments cannot yet measure.

That is not a contradiction. That is intellectual honesty.

The dog in the room is still smelling things. And the frequency Tesla was pointing at — the one the ancient Indians built entire sciences around — is still there, whether we can detect it or not.

Your Turn

Two questions this week:

Do you hold any beliefs — spiritual, philosophical, intuitive — that sit alongside your analytical or professional life rather than being explained by it? How do you navigate that?

And — has something happened in your life that you genuinely cannot explain by logic alone? You do not have to share what it was. But I am curious how many of us carry that privately.

Drop it in the comments. This is the most personal territory I have written in yet, and I suspect the conversation will be one of the richest ones we have had.

See you next Friday. Back to business — we are talking about what I have learned about hiring, specifically the mistakes I have made hiring people and what I look for now that I did not know to look for before.

— Rishi

P.S. Karm karte ja. Whatever you are building, whatever you are working toward — just keep working. The fruit follows the work. It always has.

P.P.S. If quantum physics can tell us that a particle exists in all states simultaneously until observed — I think we can afford a little humility about what else we might not yet understand.

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Pull up a chair. Chai’s hot. Let me tell you about the strangest thing in the Indian economy — the thing hiding in plain sight that almost nobody outside a boardroom talks about.

We have Tata Steel, JSW, SAIL — integrated giants at the top. We have lakhs of tiny rolling mills at the bottom. And in between? Almost nothing. Hardly any mid-sized integrated steel companies. Just a cliff.

Now here’s the uncomfortable part: that’s not a steel problem. That’s the whole manufacturing economy. Economists have a clinical name for it — “the missing middle.” I have a blunter one. We are a country that builds dwarfs and worships giants, and forgot to build everything in between.

The number that should keep you up at night

The Economic Survey did the brutal arithmetic. Look at “dwarfs” — firms with fewer than 100 workers that are more than ten years old. Old enough to know better. Big enough to have figured it out. And still small.

These dwarfs are more than half of all organised manufacturing firms by number. Half the landscape.

Their share of employment? About 14%.

Their share of productivity? Around 8%.

Read that again slowly. Half the firms. One-fourteenth the jobs. One-twelfth the output. They dominate the count and contribute almost nothing to the economy.

Now look at the other end. Large firms — more than 100 employees — are about 15% of firms by number but deliver roughly three-quarters of the employment and close to 90% of the productivity. And the most telling cut of all: large firms that are also young — big within ten years — are 5.5% of firms but throw off 37% of net value added.

The lesson writes itself. *The firms that grow are the ones that matter.* Everything good in the economy — jobs, wages, exports, productivity — comes from firms that scaled. And we have built an entire incentive structure that politely asks firms not to.

Here’s the part you won’t read in the survey

I’ve sat in the rooms where this decision actually gets made. It is never a stupid decision. That’s what people miss.

When a promoter chooses to stay small — or worse, to open a second small plant instead of growing the first — he isn’t being timid. He’s being rational. Painfully, surgically rational.

Cross 100 workers and a different India shows up at your gate. Below certain sizes you’re exempt from a thicket of compliance. Stay under the tax and GST thresholds and your cost base looks completely different from your ambitious neighbour’s. So the smart promoter doesn’t build one factory with 300 people. He builds three with 99 each. We have a name for it on the ground — the multi-plant dodge. Diversify your labour risk, your political risk, your regulatory risk. No single point of failure.

It’s brilliant. It’s defensive. And it’s terrible for India — because three sub-scale plants will never have the economies of scale, the R&D budget, the export muscle, or the balance sheet of one real factory. You’ve optimised the firm and sabotaged the nation, one rational decision at a time.

The seven reasons no one puts in the deck

Policy papers blame “finance” and “regulation” and move on. But sit across the table from a man who could grow and chose not to, and you hear the real list. Here it is, unvarnished.

One — the tax on attention, not income. Ask a promoter why he won’t grow and he’ll ask you back: why take the tension? Stay micro and nobody visits. Grow into the medium bracket and suddenly everyone knocks — Income Tax, GST, the labour department, a dozen compliances. Growth doesn’t just cost capital; it costs peace. The micro firm flies under the radar. The medium firm gets visited. We’ve quietly made visibility a punishment, and then we wonder why nobody wants to be seen.

Two — you can’t run an ERP on two sets of books. This is the one nobody says aloud. An integrated software system only works when it can capture all the data. But a business running a parallel cash economy needs the data not captured — because the system would record what the second ledger is designed to hide. So these firms stay analog by necessity. And a firm that can’t be measured can’t be managed, can’t be scaled, and — critically — can’t be funded, because no serious lender or investor underwrites a black box. The two-books habit doesn’t just dodge tax. It quietly caps the company’s ceiling forever.

Three — banks lend against gold, not against growth. The productive mid-market is starved. Banks chase AAA names and collateral they can seize; they don’t do cash-flow lending to a firm that wants to double its plant. So that firm borrows from the broker network at rates that silently decide how big it’s ever allowed to get. You cannot scale a real business on 30% money. Fix mid-market credit and you fix more of the missing middle than any labour reform will.

Four — we subsidise smallness itself. For decades the State’s message was unambiguous: stay micro and we’ll protect you with reservations, thresholds and ceilings; grow and we’ll tax and inspect you. We poured incentives into the bottom of the pyramid and built a wall halfway up. Firms heard it perfectly. They’re not irrational. The policy is.

Five — you can’t grow big without political leverage. Past a certain size, the inputs of growth — land, power connections, environmental clearances, approvals — all run through doors that only political access opens. This is where business and politics quietly intertwine, and pretending otherwise is naïve. The firm without a patron hits a ceiling that has nothing to do with its products and everything to do with its proximity. It isn’t pretty, but it’s the terrain.

Six — the owner who believes only he can do it. Every family business hits the same wall, and it isn’t financial — it’s psychological. The promoter believes no one else can do the work; that if he doesn’t personally intervene, someone will make a costly mistake. So he never delegates real decisions. But a firm can only grow as large as its founder is willing to let go. The chair won’t delegate, so the company can’t outgrow the chair. Capital is the easy part of scaling. Surrendering control is the part almost no one survives.

Seven — the brother with the veto. As joint families turn nuclear and the next generation walks in, the business inherits the family’s fault lines. Picture four brothers in one firm. Three want to build; one is conservative and content. In a shared business, the cautious one doesn’t need to win the argument — he only needs to block it. Ambition dies by committee. The most aggressive growth plans in India aren’t killed by markets or banks. They’re killed at the dinner table.

## The development economics underneath

There’s an old framing I love. Poor countries have three escape routes out of poverty: Geography (tourism — Switzerland, Mauritius), Geology (resources — Saudi, Australia), and Jeans (labour-absorbing manufacturing — Korea, China, Vietnam).

India, with the largest workforce on earth, was supposed to take the Jeans route. We didn’t. Manufacturing has been stuck at roughly 15–17% of GDP since 1991. Three decades. A whole generation of “Make in India” later, the needle barely moved.

And the missing middle is why the Jeans route stayed shut. The countries that took it — Korea, Taiwan, China — did it on the backs of mid-sized firms that grew into export champions. That’s the engine. That’s the part we never built. We have the workshop and we have the conglomerate. We’re missing the factory that becomes a champion.

## From the boardroom: what “Grow in India” would actually need

Everyone chants “Make in India.” Let me make the case for the sequel nobody’s branding — *“Grow in India.”* Not more firms. Helping the ones we have cross the chasm. A few things I’d actually put money on:

Put a sunset on every size-based crutch. The Economic Survey itself suggested it: make incentives age-based, not size-based, with a clock — 5 to 7 years — after which a firm stands on its own. Subsidise infancy, not smallness.

Make the thresholds stop being cliffs. When crossing a headcount or turnover line triggers a regime change in your compliance life, you’ve engineered the dwarf. Smooth the ramp and the dodge disappears on its own.

Formalise the upside of formalising. As long as being measured feels like pure downside — more tax, more scrutiny, more departments at the door — firms will stay opaque. The day clean books become the cheaper way to access capital and growth, the two-ledger habit dies on economics alone.

Build cash-flow lending for the mid-market. Until a growing firm can be financed on what it earns rather than what it can pledge, the broker stays the banker, and the broker’s rates set the ceiling.

Professionalise the second generation. Capital is the easy part of scaling. Letting go is the hard part — and the families that learn to delegate, and to resolve the dinner-table veto before it reaches the boardroom, are the ones whose firms outlive their founders.

## The bottom line

The missing middle isn’t an abstraction in an economics paper. It’s the auto-ancillary unit in Chakan that closed instead of growing. It’s the Tirupur knitwear cluster running at half capacity. It’s the steel sector with no rung between a rolling mill and Tata.

And underneath all of it is a single, fixable mistake: for fifty years we told Indian entrepreneurs that smallness was safe and growth was punished — and they believed us.

The good news? Most of it is choice — policy choice, financing choice, even family choice. Which means it can be un-chosen. The day staying small stops being the smart move, the middle stops going missing.

That’s the trillion-rupee question hiding in plain sight. Not “why can’t India manufacture?” We can. The real one is: why did we build an economy that begs its best companies to stay small — and when do we finally stop?

Chai’s done. More next week.

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If you run a business that hit the chasm — or chose to dodge it — hit reply. The best version of this argument comes from the people who live it, not the ones who model it.

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A quick, honest note before we begin.

This piece is late. It is Saturday night as I finally sit down to finish it — not the Friday you’ve come to expect. Some unavoidable circumstances and a genuine emergency on my end pulled me away this week, and I tried to get this out as soon as I reasonably could.

I owe you an apology for breaking the rhythm we’ve built together over the last fourteen weeks, and I do not take that lightly. Old Money New Code has been a Friday ritual since the beginning, and I want it to stay that way. This week, life simply got in the way. Thank you for your patience — normal service resumes next week.

Now — let’s get into it.

Here is something that took me years to fully appreciate.

The same business problem — financing working capital, building a relationship with a government official, getting goods through customs, handling a customer dispute — does not have one solution. It has as many solutions as there are countries you operate in.

Hemraj Group operates across India, Nigeria, and Vietnam. Same core business —agricultural commodities, rice, solvent extraction, edible oils. Same fundamental problems every business faces.

Three completely different worlds of how to solve them.

Let me take you through what I have learned.

How You Gift A Bureaucrat

Let’s start with something small but revealing.In Vietnam, if you go to meet a senior bureaucrat, an officer, or a banker — and you arrive empty-handed — it is considered genuinely discourteous. Poor manners. The expectation is built into the culture of how relationships with officialdom are formed.

In Nigeria — alcohol is not an option. We operate in the northern part of the country, which is Muslim-dominated, so the gift is different — a bag of rice, or another essential commodity, practical and valued precisely because it solves a real need.

In India — none of this. It is about the paperwork. The right documents, properly presented,with the right connections behind them. Relationships matter enormously in India too — but the relationship is built through process, through follow-up, through knowing the right people higher up the chain. Not through a gift at the first meeting.

Same fundamental need — building trust with someone who holds power over your business. Three completely different cultural mechanisms for achieving it.

The Vietnam Surprise That Genuinely Fascinated Me

Here is something I did not expect, and something that took me a while to fully process.

In Vietnam, an employee on your full-time payroll — drawing a regular salary from you — will also charge a commission from the supplier or the customer on transactions they are conducting on your behalf.

Let that sit for a moment. Your own employee, sitting in a negotiation representing your interests as the buyer, is simultaneously taking a cut from the seller on the other side of the table. And this is not hidden, not whispered about, not something uncovered through investigation. It is simply how business operates. Open. Accepted. Built into the system.

I found this genuinely fascinating, in the way you find something fascinating when it completely upends an assumption you did not know you were carrying. In India, this kind of dual income exists — but quietly. Under the table. Something people do but do not discuss.

India is simply not at the stage, culturally or institutionally, where this would be acceptable as an open practice.

In Vietnam, it is just Tuesday.

Unions — Present, Absent, And Everywhere In Between

One more structural difference worth mentioning.

In Vietnam, labour unions are essentially absent from how factories and businesses operateday to day. The same is largely true in Nigeria. In India, by contrast, political unions — particularly among blue-collar workers — remain a significant and active force, shaping negotiations, work stoppages, and the basic rhythm of factory operations in ways that simply do not exist in the other two markets.

It changes everything about how you plan labour relations, how you negotiate, and how much friction you should expect in a typical year of operations.

The Two-Hour Office Siesta

Here is one of the most genuinely delightful cultural surprises I have encountered.

In Vietnam, after lunch, the entire office sleeps. For two hours.

Lights go off. People recline in dedicated sleeping chairs, set at a comfortable angle, or sometimes simply lie down on the floor. No work happens. No phones are answered. The office, for two hours in the middle of every working day, simply pauses.

For someone working from India — where lunch is often eaten at your desk between calls, and a two hour midday pause would be unthinkable — this was a genuinely fascinating thing to witness firsthand. It is not laziness. It is built into the culture as a recognised, accepted, structural part of how the working day is organised. And from what I have observed, it does not seem to hurt Vietnamese productivity in the slightest — if anything, the focus in the remaining hours seems sharper for it.

Nigeria — Where Even The Banks Surprise You

I have written before about how difficult banking is in Nigeria. But there is one thing I have not told you yet, and it is genuinely one of the strangest things I have encountered in business.

In Nigeria, a customer can recall a payment they have already made — three to four days after making it.

This has happened to us. Multiple times.

You receive payment. You process the order, perhaps even ship the goods. And then — days later — the payment is recalled. Reversed. Gone. And there is, in practical terms, very little you can do about it directly. You chase the bank. You chase the customer. You ask them to instruct their bank to make the payment again. And sometimes that works, and sometimes it takes considerable time and effort, and sometimes you absorb the loss.This is precisely why insurance plays such an outsized role in how we operate in Nigeria.

Fraud insurance, payment default insurance — coverage that simply is not necessary in the same way in India or Vietnam, because the underlying banking infrastructure does not provide the same guarantees once a transaction is complete.

The reason this is possible at all goes back to something I mentioned a few weeks ago — Nigeria’s banking system today resembles where India’s banking system was twenty or thirty years ago. Manual bookkeeping. Limited electronic interconnection between banks and the central bank. Which means duplicate accounts are easy to create, sources of income are hard to trace, and the kind of institutional safeguards that prevent a “recalled payment” situation in India simply have not been built yet in Nigeria.

Three Approaches To Working Capital

This one is genuinely instructive for anyone thinking about expanding internationally. In India, working capital financing follows a relatively standard pattern most business owners understand well. In Vietnam, banks finance working capital against an invoice — but here is the fascinating part. Once that invoice is paid, the bank does not automatically recall the loan. The repayment is only due after six months. Which means, within that window, you can turn around the same financed capital multiple times — using it, repaying the underlying transaction, and reusing the same facility again before the six month repayment deadline arrives. Some businesses simply keep the capital parked with the bank for the full window rather than repaying early. This kind of capital efficiency simply does not exist in the Indian banking structure.

In Nigeria — none of this. Working capital loans for foreign businesses are nearly impossible to access in the first place, as I have written about before. The entire conversation about “turning around capital efficiently” is moot when the starting point is that credit barely exists.

Same financial instrument — working capital financing. Three entirely different operating realities depending entirely on which country’s banking maturity you are dealing with.

Credit, Trust, And The Spectrum Between Them

Here is a spectrum that took me years across three countries to fully map.

In Nigeria — credit essentially does not exist. Nobody trusts anyone. All business is done inadvance, cash upfront, because the institutional and legal infrastructure to enforce a credit relationship simply is not reliable enough for businesses to extend trust.

In India — credit is foundational. As I wrote a few weeks ago, a significant percentage of our business runs on a phone call and a handshake, built on industry reputation, reinforced by referral networks and decades of relationship. The legal system exists as a backstop, but trust does the actual work.

In Vietnam — credit is also a major part of the economy, though built on a different foundation than India’s relationship-based system. It is more formally embedded in how banks and businesses structure their transactions.

Three countries. Three entirely different relationships with the most fundamental question in commerce: will you be paid for what you sell?

Airports Tell You Everything

If you want to understand a country’s relationship with its own infrastructure, watch how long it takes to board a domestic flight.

In Nigeria, boarding even a domestic flight can take approximately three hours. Multiple baggage checks at multiple points within the airport. Multiple security checks. Multiple opportunities, frankly, for the system to be slow specifically because slowness creates opportunities — for “facilitation,” for inconvenience to be monetised, for the friction itself to become a revenue stream for someone along the way.

In Vietnam, immigration can also take two to three hours — but for an entirely different reason. Vietnam is genuinely booming. The China Plus One shift has brought enormous international interest — Chinese companies, global manufacturers, all setting up operations, buying land at rapidly escalating prices, moving people in and out constantly. The delay in Vietnam is the delay of success outpacing infrastructure. A good problem, fundamentally, even if it is frustrating in the moment.

In India — by comparison, considerably more developed. Airports, transportation, the digital backbone of UPI, e-way bills, GST — these systems, whatever their imperfections, represent a level of infrastructure maturity that neither Nigeria nor Vietnam has yet reached.

Three countries, three different reasons for friction at the border. One because of extraction. One because of growth outpacing capacity. One mostly resolved already.I will also say honestly — overall workforce efficiency in Nigeria tends to be lower than in India or Vietnam. But I think this has far more to do with the underlying gaps in education,training infrastructure, and economic stability than with any lack of capability or willingnessin the people themselves. Give someone consistent access to training, healthcare, and stable income, and efficiency follows. That investment simply has not happened yet at scale in the regions we operate in.

The Insurance Comparison That Surprised Me

One final comparison, and I think it is genuinely illuminating. In India, insurance claims are processed with scientific rigor. Detailed calculations, in-depth assessments, thorough documentation. The process is professional and precise — and also, frequently, very slow. Settlement can take a year, sometimes two.

In Nigeria, the process is almost the opposite. Calculations happen at a much more surface level — macro assessments rather than detailed scientific analysis. The process is simpler, less rigorous, and — critically — settlement happens considerably faster than in India.

Vietnam sits somewhere between the two — not as exhaustive as India’s process, not as fast and surface-level as Nigeria’s.

Neither extreme is purely better. India’s rigor protects against fraud but costs you time.

Nigeria’s speed gets you paid but with less scrutiny built into the system. The right answer depends entirely on what you value more in a given situation — precision or speed.

The Lesson Underneath All Of This

Here is what sixteen years across three countries has taught me, and I think it is the most important takeaway. There is no universal “right way” to do business. There are only contextually appropriate ways, shaped by each country’s history, institutions, culture, and stage of development.

The instinct that many businesses have — to take what works in their home market and simply replicate it elsewhere — is a recipe for failure. What works in India because of decades of relationship-based trust will not work in Nigeria, where that same trust simply has not had time or institutional support to develop. What works in Nigeria’s faster, looser insurance settlement process would be considered reckless in India’s more developed regulatory environment.

The businesses that succeed internationally are not the ones with the best product or the most capital. They are the ones willing to genuinely understand — not judge, not impose, genuinely understand — how a different country actually operates, and adapt accordingly.Every country is solving the same fundamental business problems. Trust. Capital. Infrastructure. Risk. The solutions look completely different because the history and context behind each one is completely different.

Once you internalise that — international business stops feeling like chaos and starts feeling like a fascinating puzzle.

The Poverty I Was Not Prepared For

I want to end this comparison with something heavier, because I think honesty requires it. Operating in northern Nigeria has shown me a level of poverty I had genuinely never witnessed in my lifetime in India, and have not witnessed in Vietnam either. Social security structures that exist in some form in India — however imperfect — are largely absent. Family sizes in the communities we work in are often very large, and the economic strain on households as a result is visible everywhere — in the villages around our facilities, in the workforce, in daily life.

It is sobering in a way that is difficult to fully convey in writing. You see it, and it changes how you think about the privilege of stability — the kind of stability that India, for all its own challenges, has built over decades.

I say this not to paint Nigeria in a single light. The country has extraordinary natural resources, a young and growing population, and a government that I believe is increasingly oriented toward genuine development. Things are improving. But the legacy gap — built over decades of underinvestment in basic infrastructure and social systems — will take time to close. Anyone doing business there needs to go in with eyes open to that reality, and with genuine respect for the people navigating it every day.

The Mistake We Made With A Percentage Sign

I want to share one more story, because it is the clearest example I have of how a system that is completely fair in one market can become deeply unfair the moment you transplant it somewhere else without thinking it through.

In our India rice mills, we have a standard practice for handling excess moisture in paddy. If our acceptable threshold is fourteen percent moisture and a farmer delivers paddy at sixteen percent, we deduct the value of that excess two percent from the price — calculated as a percentage of the total price of the paddy. Every farmer in India understands this. It is standard, transparent, and accepted across the industry.When we set up operations in Nigeria, we applied the exact same system. Same logic, same percentage-based deduction for excess moisture.

It was a mistake. A genuinely significant one.

In Nigeria, most of the farmers and sellers we work with do not think in percentages the way the Indian market does. A two percent deduction calculated against the total value of the paddy is a meaningful sum of money — and to farmers unfamiliar with percentage-based pricing, it looked enormous, disproportionate, almost punitive compared to what they expected. The actual fair-market equivalent in Nigeria is typically a flat, small deduction — something in the range of two naira per kilo, which works out to less than half a percent of the total cost of goods. A completely different order of magnitude from what our Indian-style percentage calculation was producing.

We did not understand this distinction in our first year. We applied our India logic, the deductions came out far higher than local sellers expected or considered fair, and the result was real reputational damage in the local market — sellers concluded, not unreasonably, that a foreign company had arrived and was trying to shortchange them. It took us through the second and third year of operations — careful cross-checking, local consultation, and a genuine rebuild of trust — to correct course and align our pricing mechanism with what was actually fair and expected in that market.

It remains one of the most important lessons from our entire Nigeria journey. A system can be completely honest, completely standard, completely fair in the market it was built for — and still cause genuine harm the moment you apply it somewhere else without first understanding how that market actually thinks about value.

Your Turn

Two questions this week:

If you have done business across multiple countries — what is your version of the bureaucrat gift story? The small cultural detail that completely surprised you?

And — has a banking or payment surprise ever cost you money in a market you weren’t fully prepared for? What happened?

Drop it in the comments. I learn as much from these stories as I hope you learn from mine.

See you next Friday. We are talking about something I have not addressed yet — Vedicastrology, my engagement with it, and how a third-generation business person who thinks in DuPont analysis and listed comparables also makes room for something far less rational in how he makes decisions.

This one might surprise you.

— Rishi

P.S. If you are doing business internationally and assuming your home market’s playbook will work elsewhere — it won’t. Learn the local rules before you try to win the local game.

P.P.S. To the Vietnamese employee charging commission from both sides of every deal — I see you. I respect the hustle.

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Here is a number worth sitting with.

In January 2025, India was importing roughly 1.5 million barrels of Russian crude a day. By January 2026, that had collapsed to about 436,000 barrels — a fall of more than 70% in twelve months. Over the same window, American energy exports to India rose by two-thirds.

That single reversal is the whole argument of this piece in miniature. For three years we told ourselves a flattering story: that India had outmanoeuvred a fracturing world. That while the West tied itself in moral knots over Russia, we coolly bought discounted barrels, kept inflation in check, and posted the fastest growth among major economies. Strategic autonomy, we called it. The chess player in a room full of people flipping the board.

I want to offer the uncomfortable version. Most of what we are calling strategy was circumstance. The wars in Ukraine and West Asia, the Red Sea closures, the US–China decoupling — these handed India a set of tailwinds we did not build and largely cannot control. Some of those gifts are already being clawed back. And the danger is not the chaos itself. The danger is that we are booking a temporary windfall as permanent income, and building neither the buffers nor the muscle to survive the moment the windfall ends.

Let me walk through the four big gifts, what each one is really worth, and which way the wind is now blowing.

Gift one: cheap Russian oil — the loan we mistook for a salary

The discounted-crude trade was real money. India’s cumulative savings since 2022 run into the low tens of billions of dollars — one widely-cited estimate puts it around $12.6 billion in direct savings, with far larger implied savings from the fact that India’s buying helped keep global oil from spiking past $100 for any sustained period. For a country that imports roughly 89% of its oil, that was genuine breathing room: softer inflation, a less ugly trade deficit, room for the RBI to manoeuvre.

But look at what the discount actually did over time. It started around $30 a barrel in mid-2022. It shrank to single digits. And then in 2025 the structure of the trade got expensive in ways that have nothing to do with the sticker price.

In August 2025, Washington stacked a 25% penalty tariff on top of an existing 25% reciprocal tariff — a cumulative 50% wall on Indian exports, explicitly tied to our Russian oil purchases. That is among the highest tariff burdens applied to any major US trading partner. Then in late November, US sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil — together roughly 60% of India’s Russian intake — took effect. The EU moved in parallel, banning imports of refined products made from Russian crude from January 2026, which directly threatens the lucrative re-export business where India bought cheap Russian barrels, refined them, and sold the diesel into Europe.

The tariff was lifted in February 2026, after India made commitments on US energy purchases and a US Supreme Court ruling constrained the legal basis for the tariffs. So this looks like a happy ending. It is not. It is a demonstration.

Here is the lesson, and it is the central lesson of the whole decade: *the savings were never a dividend from Indian strategy. They were a loan from geopolitics, and geopolitics sets the repayment terms.* We saved billions on oil and then watched our exporters — textiles, gems and jewellery, engineering goods — get put at a 50% disadvantage to Vietnam and Bangladesh for six months because of the very same trade. The crude discount and the tariff penalty were two sides of one coin. We only ever looked at one side.

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Gift two: the China+1 windfall in electronics — real, but rented

This is the gift I am most optimistic about, which is exactly why it deserves the hardest scrutiny.

The numbers are genuinely good. Electronics has climbed from India’s seventh-largest export category in FY2022 to the second-largest in FY2026, behind only petroleum products — about $22.2 billion exported by late January 2026. Mobile phone manufacturing went from ₹18,000 crore in FY2015 to ₹5.45 lakh crore in FY2025, a thirty-fold jump in a decade. We went from two mobile production units to over 300, from net importer to the world’s second-largest mobile manufacturer.

The same export controls that lock SMIC and Huawei out of TSMC and ASML are pushing American and European firms to build design and packaging capacity outside China and Taiwan. India offers English-speaking engineers, a non-China alignment, and a government writing large subsidy cheques. That is a structural shift, not a temporary one. The decoupling of the semiconductor supply chain is the closest thing to a durable, compoundable gift in this entire list.

So where is the contrarian edge? Two places.

First, much of our “manufacturing” is still assembly. We import the components, screw them together, and export the box. The value actually captured in India — the design, the chips, the high-margin intermediates — remains thin. Mobile exports of $57 billion sound spectacular until you net out the imported content.

Second, the window is not open forever, and we are not the only ones standing in front of it. Malaysia, Vietnam, and Singapore have been eating China+1 electronics share for years and have deeper ecosystems. Our first commercial fab — Tata–PSMC at Dholera — is targeting first silicon only in late 2026, and at mature 28nm nodes, not the frontier. The first real ATMP facilities only came online in early 2026. China is simultaneously expanding mature-node capacity at scale, precisely the segment India is betting on, and can flood it with cheap chips the moment it wants to.

The electronics gift is the one worth fighting hardest to keep, because it is the one that can become genuinely ours. But it is rented today, not owned. Backward integration — components, materials, design, the boring high-purity supplier base — is the rent-to-buy payment. We are still mostly paying rent.

Gift three: defence — the one windfall we are actually converting

Credit where it is due, because the contrarian who only criticises is just a pessimist with a thesis.

Wars make every nation a buyer, and India is finally a seller. Defence exports hit a record ₹38,424 crore in FY2025-26 — a 62.7% jump in a single year, roughly tripling over five years, now reaching more than 80 countries. Defence production crossed ₹1.78 lakh crore, nearly double the level of five years ago. The private sector’s share is climbing. Platforms once exclusively imported — artillery, patrol vessels, light transport aircraft — are now built here.

This is the template for what converting a windfall actually looks like. The global security panic created demand; India built supply behind it — DRDO systems moving into the supply chain, the Tejas line in production, 145 firms now exporting versus 128 a year earlier. The ₹50,000 crore export target by FY2028-29 is roughly 30% above today’s record, and after a 63% jump in one year, it is no longer fanciful.

The honest caveat: deliveries still lag schedule — the Tejas-Mk1A timeline has slipped — and we remain a major importer of advanced platforms even as exports grow. But defence is the proof that a geopolitical gift can be turned into a durable national capability when the industrial follow-through actually happens. The question to ask of every other sector is: are we doing here what we did in defence? Mostly, the answer is no.

Gift four: the gift that was actually a tax — shipping

Here is where the “India is winning” narrative completely inverts.

We do not control the sea, and the sea is where our fate is decided. Over 85% — by some counts more than 90% — of India’s trade moves on foreign-owned ships. So when the Red Sea closed under Houthi attacks and the Strait of Hormuz came under pressure, India did not collect a windfall. India paid a tax.

The freight rate on a Kolkata–Rotterdam container blew out from around $500 to roughly $4,000. Air cargo rates on India–Middle East routes spiked 250–300%. Carriers rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope, adding 10–14 days and burning fuel the whole way. India imports 53% of its LNG from Qatar and the UAE — both corridors disrupted at once. Our west-coast ports sit precisely at the junction of two crises.

This is the cleanest illustration of the entire problem. The same fracturing world that gave us cheap oil took money straight out of every exporter’s pocket through freight — and we had almost no instrument to stop it, because we never built a merchant fleet, never built the logistics sovereignty, never treated shipping as strategic infrastructure the way we belatedly treated chips and defence. Alternative corridors — IMEC, the INSTC, the Trans-Caspian route — are promising lines on a map. They are not yet capacity you can book a container on next week.

The next five years: which gifts survive, and what to actually do

Strip away the flattery and the picture is clear. Of the four big geopolitical gifts of this decade, one is reversing (cheap oil), one is a net cost we mislabelled as a win (shipping), one is real but rented (electronics), and only one is being genuinely converted into durable capability (defence).

The next five years will be decided by a single question: *what happens when the disruption normalises?* Because here is the part nobody on the celebratory side wants to say out loud — peace is the real competitive threat, not war.

The day the Ukraine war settles, discounted Russian crude evaporates and a sanctions-freed Russia re-enters normal markets. The day the Red Sea reopens, a wall of idle container capacity floods back and freight economics scramble again — and a China desperate to win back lost markets becomes a far more aggressive competitor than a disrupted China ever was. The wartime chaos that looked like our opportunity was, in many sectors, just a temporary suppression of our toughest competition.

So what does an operator — not a commentator — actually do with this?

Treat windfalls as capex, not income. The oil savings should have been visibly recycled into the buffers and capabilities that outlast the discount: strategic petroleum reserves (we hold under two weeks’ cover), energy diversification, refining flexibility. A windfall consumed is gone; a windfall invested compounds.

*Buy down the rented gifts.* In electronics, the entire game now is backward integration — components, materials, the high-purity supplier base, design value. Assembly is rent. Owning the value chain is the purchase. The China+1 window is the best chance we will get; treat it like a clock, not a guarantee.

*Build the missing leg: logistics sovereignty.* A merchant fleet, port capacity, and real alternative corridors are not glamorous. But shipping was the one place the fracturing world simply taxed us, and we had no answer. That is a strategic vulnerability hiding in plain sight.

Copy the defence playbook everywhere. Defence worked because demand was met with deliberate, subsidised, follow-through industrial supply. That is the difference between a country that receives a windfall and one that converts it.

India is not the chess player in a room of people flipping the board. India is a player who has been dealt an extraordinary hand by a dealer who can ask for the cards back. The hand is real. The growth is real. But a borrowed decade is only a triumph if you use the loan to build something that outlasts it.

The bill is coming. The only question is whether we spent the money on muscle — or on the mirror.

If this resonated, forward it to someone who still thinks the oil discount was a strategy rather than a loan. And tell me where you think I’m wrong — the comments are open.

Every few months, I hear some version of the same argument.

"Why should India automate? Labour is cheap."

On the surface, it sounds logical. India has the world’s largest population. Millions of young people enter the workforce every year. Wages remain significantly lower than in developed countries. If labour is abundant and inexpensive, why invest heavily in automation, robotics, AI and advanced manufacturing technologies?

The problem is that this argument may have been true twenty years ago.

It is becoming increasingly disconnected from reality today.

In my view, one of the biggest misconceptions in Indian business is the belief that cheap labour will remain India’s primary competitive advantage. The businesses that dominate the next two decades will not be those that employ the most people. They will be those that achieve the highest productivity per employee. And that distinction matters enormously — because productivity, not labour cost, is what ultimately determines whether a country becomes a manufacturing superpower.

The Labour Shortage Nobody Wants to Talk About

Ask almost any factory owner, warehouse operator, logistics company, construction contractor or agricultural entrepreneur what their biggest operational challenge is.

Very few will say technology. Very few will say financing.

Many will say labour. Not labour cost — labour availability. Finding workers. Retaining workers. Maintaining productivity. Reducing absenteeism and turnover. Ensuring reliability.

For decades, India benefited from an almost endless supply of blue-collar labour. Businesses could assume that if one worker left, another would be available tomorrow. That assumption is becoming increasingly fragile.

What many economists describe as a labour-abundant country often feels very different on the factory floor. The reality experienced by operators and industrialists frequently differs from the narrative discussed in boardrooms and television studios.

India’s Demographic Story Is Changing

Most Indians still think of India as a country struggling with population explosion. The numbers tell a different story.

India’s fertility rate has fallen dramatically over the last four decades. In the mid-1980s, Indian women had, on average, approximately 4.5 children. Today, India’s fertility rate has fallen below replacement level in many regions. States such as Kerala, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Delhi already have fertility rates comparable to many developed economies.

Why does this matter? Because labour markets respond to demographics with a delay. The impact is not visible immediately — it becomes visible ten, twenty or thirty years later. China experienced this. Japan experienced this. South Korea experienced this. Every industrialized nation eventually discovers that population size and labour availability are not the same thing. India will not be an exception.

Aspirations Change Faster Than Economists Realize

There is another reality that many business discussions overlook. A labourer’s son does not want to become a labourer. A truck driver’s son does not want to become a truck driver. A factory worker’s daughter does not aspire to spend her life performing repetitive manual tasks.

And frankly — they shouldn’t. This is not a problem. This is progress.

Economic development changes aspirations. As incomes rise, education improves and access to information expands, people naturally seek cleaner, safer and more respected forms of employment. Government welfare schemes, improved healthcare, subsidized food programs, housing assistance and better education have contributed to this shift. Whether one supports these policies or opposes them politically is irrelevant. The economic consequence is clear: people have more options than they did twenty years ago. And when people have more options, fewer choose physically demanding work.

Businesses that fail to recognize this shift are planning for a labour market that no longer exists.

Climate Is Becoming an Economic Variable

There is another factor that receives surprisingly little attention in manufacturing boardrooms: climate.

Every year, large parts of India experience temperatures exceeding 40 degrees Celsius. In some regions, temperatures regularly approach 45 to 50 degrees. Add humidity and the challenge becomes even greater. Anyone who operates factories, warehouses, construction projects or agricultural businesses understands what this means — productivity falls, fatigue rises, breaks become more frequent, medical risks increase and errors multiply.

Heat stress is no longer simply an environmental issue. It is becoming an economic issue — and the data below shows it is accelerating.

A worker unloading trucks in May in North India is operating under conditions that would challenge even the most physically fit individual. Machines do not suffer from heat exhaustion. Automated systems do not require hydration breaks. Robots do not experience fatigue during heatwaves. As climate conditions become more extreme, automation becomes not just economically attractive but operationally necessary.

The Real Cost of Labour

One of the most common mistakes business owners make is comparing wages with machine costs. That comparison is incomplete. The true cost of labour includes recruitment, training, supervision, absenteeism, turnover, safety incidents, compliance, productivity variation, quality failures and shift interruptions. Most businesses underestimate these hidden costs significantly.

For example, if a machine improves production output by just 5%, that improvement may appear insignificant. But in a low-margin industry operating at large scale, a 5% productivity gain can transform profitability. Similarly, reducing defects by even 2% can create substantial value in export-oriented industries where quality standards are strict and customer expectations are unforgiving.

Automation is rarely just about reducing headcount. It is about improving consistency. And consistency is where global competitiveness is won.

The productivity gap shown above is stark. India’s output per manufacturing worker is not just behind developed economies — it is significantly behind China, which once competed on similar cost structures. The difference is not wages. The difference is machines.

Why China Is Winning

Many Indians continue to view China through a 1990s lens — imagining a country competing primarily through cheap labour. That China no longer exists.

Over the past decade, China has become one of the world’s most automated manufacturing economies. China now installs more industrial robots annually than the rest of the world combined in many equipment categories. Robot density in Chinese manufacturing has increased dramatically. The country has invested heavily in automated factories, AI-driven production systems and advanced industrial technologies.

Why? Because Chinese leaders understand something many countries still do not: the future belongs to productivity, not population.

The countries leading global manufacturing today — South Korea, Japan, Germany, Singapore, China — are also among the most automated. This is not a coincidence. No nation has become a manufacturing powerhouse by remaining dependent on manual labour forever. Every successful industrial economy eventually embraces automation. India will have to do the same.

The Hidden Quality Revolution

When most people think about automation, they think about labour savings. I think the more important advantage is quality.

India’s biggest manufacturing challenge is not labour cost. It is consistency. A global customer can tolerate a slightly higher price. They cannot tolerate inconsistent quality. Machines excel at repetition. A robot can perform the same operation thousands of times with minimal variation. A human worker’s performance naturally fluctuates due to fatigue, distractions, health conditions and environmental factors.

As Indian manufacturers attempt to move up the value chain and compete globally, consistency will become increasingly important. The companies that master quality will capture export opportunities. The companies that fail to do so will compete only on price. And competing solely on price is rarely a winning strategy.

Some Jobs Should Disappear

This may be the most controversial part of the discussion. But it needs to be said.

Human beings should not spend decades inhaling toxic chemicals if machines can perform the same work. People should not be exposed to hazardous mining conditions if automation can reduce risk. Workers should not spend entire careers performing repetitive tasks that technology can execute more safely and efficiently.

Throughout history, technological progress has eliminated dangerous forms of labour. Agricultural machinery reduced backbreaking farm work. Industrial machinery reduced manual manufacturing. Computers reduced repetitive paperwork. Artificial intelligence and robotics represent the next stage of that process.

The objective should not be preserving every existing job. The objective should be creating better jobs — higher-skilled, safer, more productive, and higher-paying. That is how economies advance.

The Next Industrial Revolution

The first industrial revolution replaced muscle with machines. The second electrified industry. The third introduced computers. The fourth is combining AI, robotics and automation in ways that are qualitatively different — because machines are no longer replacing only physical effort. They are increasingly capable of replacing inspection, monitoring, analysis and routine decision-making.

This dramatically expands the range of tasks that can be automated. The implications for manufacturing, logistics, warehousing and supply chains are profound. The entrepreneurs who understand this shift early will build some of India’s most valuable businesses — not because they employ the most workers, but because they enable the highest levels of productivity.

My Prediction for India

By 2035, many Indian factories will look fundamentally different from today’s factories. Warehouses will require significantly fewer workers. Material movement will become increasingly autonomous. Quality inspection will be AI-driven. Industrial safety monitoring will be AI-driven. Predictive maintenance will become standard. Humanoid robots will begin appearing in environments where repetitive physical tasks dominate.

The businesses that adopt these technologies early will gain significant competitive advantages. The businesses that resist them may find themselves competing with a cost structure that no longer makes sense.

A National Choice

India stands at an important crossroads. We can continue believing that our future lies in an endless supply of cheap labour. Or we can accept a more difficult but more rewarding reality.

The countries that dominate the next fifty years will not be those with the largest populations. They will be those with the highest productivity.

India has the talent. India has the entrepreneurs. India has the market. India has the capital. What India now needs is the courage to embrace productivity as aggressively as it once embraced labour abundance.

The next generation of Indian industrial giants will not be built by asking how many workers they can hire. They will be built by asking how much output, quality and value each worker can create.

That is the real future of manufacturing.

And the countries that understand this first will shape the industrial economy of the twenty-first century.

Rishi Agarwal

Managing Director, Hemraj Group · Founder, GAPB

Data sources: World Bank · India Meteorological Department · International Federation of Robotics (IFR) World Robotics Report 2023 · ILO · India Sample Registration System

Here is a scenario that plays out more often than you would think in the export business.

A ship full of cargo arrives at a port. Everything is fine. The goods are good. The buyer wants the goods. The money is ready to be paid.

And the cargo sits there. Unloaded. Untouched. Accumulating costs by the day.

Because a piece of paper has not arrived yet.

This is the export business. Not the glamorous parts, the deals, the relationships, the margins, the geography. The paperwork. And today I want to tell you why the paperwork is not bureaucracy. The paperwork IS the business.

How Hemraj Got Into Exports

We started exporting in 2010.

Our first export came through a connection made on a business delegation, an organised trip where a group of Indian businesses from the same industry travel together to a country where opportunity exists. The industry was already exporting there. We wanted in.

Here is the thing about business delegations that I want every first time exporter to understand: credibility by association matters enormously. When you arrive as part of an organised industry delegation, buyers perceive you differently. The interactions are more serious, the leads are more genuine, the conversations move faster. We made our first contact this way, and that relationship became the foundation of our export business.

If you are starting an export business today, my advice is the same advice I would give anyone. Attend the trade fairs. Every industry has them, the annual or periodic events where buyers and sellers from across the world gather in one place. Put up a booth. And critically, fix your meetings before you arrive. Do not go and hope to bump into the right people. Identify exactly who you want to meet and schedule it in advance. The fair is far more valuable when you walk in with a calendar than when you walk in with hope.

Mistake One — Competing On Price By Compromising On Quality

This is the mistake I see most often. And it is the one that looks smart in the short term and is catastrophic in the long term.

A new exporter enters a competitive market. To win the first few deals, they quote a price lower than what their quality actually costs to produce. To make that price viable, they quietly reduce the quality, a slightly inferior grade, a small substitution, something the buyer may not notice immediately.

The deal closes. The exporter feels like they won.

And then the buyer notices. Maybe not on this shipment. Maybe on the next one, or the one after that. And once a buyer realises that what they received does not match what was promised, that relationship is over. Not paused. Over.

Worse, in commodity trading, reputations travel. The buyer talks to other buyers. The word spreads that this exporter’s quality does not match their quotes. And now the cost of that one shipment’s “savings” has been paid back many times over, in relationships that will never form because of a reputation that arrived before you did.

Quality has to be standardised. The quality must match what was promised, every time, regardless of price pressure. If a shipment results in a loss because maintaining quality cost more than the price allowed, that loss is borne by the exporter. That is the cost of staying in the business for the long term.

Price can go up or down. Quality cannot move. The moment quality becomes negotiable, you have left the export business and entered the one time transaction business, and those do not compound.

Mistake Two — Underestimating Logistics

Logistics is where the hidden costs live.

From your production facility to the port, through customs clearance, onto the vessel, across the ocean, to the destination port, every single step is an opportunity for delay, damage, or cost escalation. And a single day’s delay can have consequences for your shipment’s economics that are completely disproportionate to “one day.”

You need a logistics partner who can handle the entire chain, domestic transport, port clearance, vessel loading, and tracking all the way to Proof of Delivery. Not a partner for one leg of the journey. A partner for the whole journey. Because the moment responsibility is split across multiple parties, accountability for delays becomes nobody’s problem, and you are the one who pays for it.

First time exporters consistently underestimate this. They focus on the deal, the price, the product, and treat logistics as an afterthought, a line item to be sorted out later. It is not a line item. It is the difference between a profitable shipment and a loss making one.

Mistake Three — The Documentation Countdown

This is the one I most want first time exporters to understand. Because it is the one that catches almost everyone, and it is entirely preventable.

Here is how it works.

Once your ship sails, there is a tendency to relax. The hard part, production, loading, getting the vessel out, is done. The documentation feels like a formality that can be sorted out at a comfortable pace.

This is the mistake.

After the ship sails, you still need a series of documents, the phytosanitary certificate, the fumigation certificate, surveyor reports, certificate of origin, and others depending on the cargo and destination. Each of these is issued by a government department, each takes time, each requires constant follow up.

Meanwhile, the ship is moving. Depending on the route, it might take seven to ten days for a direct vessel, or it could arrive in two to three days if the routing is favourable. The variability matters because your documentation has to be ready before the ship arrives, not after.

Here is why. Once the documents are ready, they go to your bank. Your bank couriers them to the counterparty bank in the buyer’s country. The buyer then makes payment and releases the documents to claim their cargo.

This entire chain, documentation prep, bank transfer, counterparty bank processing, buyer payment, cargo release, needs to be complete before or very shortly after the vessel arrives at the destination port.

Because the moment the vessel arrives, the countdown begins.

Detention and demurrage charges start accruing from the day the ship reaches port, for every day the cargo sits unclaimed. If your documents are not ready, if they have not reached the buyer’s bank, the buyer cannot make payment and cannot release the cargo, and the cargo sits there, accumulating costs.

And here is the part that hurts. Those detention and demurrage costs? The buyer passes them back to the seller. To you. For a delay that was entirely about paperwork, not product, not price, not quality, you absorb a real financial loss.

The documentation turnaround time is not bureaucracy. It is a race against a clock that starts the moment your ship reaches port. And first time exporters lose that race constantly because nobody told them the clock exists.

The Banking Trap Nobody Warns You About

Here is the final piece, and it is the one that costs new exporters money quietly, continuously, and almost invisibly.

When you receive payment for an export shipment in foreign currency, your bank converts it to rupees. That conversion involves three components: the spot rate, the cash spot difference, and the bank’s margin.

Banks, and I say this from sixteen years of direct experience, routinely misquote all three of these. Not occasionally. Repeatedly. For every single conversion, for every invoice, the rates need to be negotiated and monitored. The moment you stop monitoring even one transaction, the bank will quote you a rate less favourable than what is actually prevailing in the market.

This happens disproportionately to first time exporters and MSMEs, businesses that do not yet have the volume to command attention, and do not yet have the knowledge of how a bank’s forex desk actually operates, how hedging works, how the margin structure is built.

When we started, this cost us real money. It took us four to five months to fully understand the mechanics, to know what questions to ask, what rates to cross check across multiple platforms, what a fair margin actually looks like for our volume.

And here is the thing, it never fully stops being a negotiation. As your volumes grow, the margins banks charge should come down. But they do not come down automatically. You have to ask. Renegotiate. Push. The relationship with your bank’s forex desk is not a one time setup. It is an ongoing negotiation for as long as you are exporting.

What I Would Tell A First Time Exporter Today

If someone came to me tomorrow and said “I want to start exporting”, here is what I would tell them, in order.

Go to the trade fairs. Fix meetings before you arrive. Credibility by association is real, find an industry delegation if you can.

Never compromise on quality to win on price. The first deal you lose by holding your quality is cheaper than the reputation you lose by not holding it.

Get a logistics partner who owns the entire chain, not just a piece of it. A single day’s delay costs more than you think.

Understand the documentation timeline before your first shipment sails, not after. Know exactly what documents you need, how long each takes, and work backward from your vessel’s arrival date.

And find someone, a consultant, a bank relationship manager you trust, an experienced exporter willing to mentor you, who can teach you the forex mechanics before your first few conversions cost you money you didn’t need to lose.

None of this is glamorous. All of it is the actual business.

Your Turn

Two questions this week:

If you are in the export business, what was your version of the documentation countdown? The moment you learned that a piece of paper could cost you real money?

And have you ever caught your bank misquoting a rate? How did you figure it out, and what did you do about it?

Drop it in the comments. The practical knowledge in this community is genuinely valuable and I want more of it shared.

See you next Friday. We are talking about something close to home, what running a business across India, Nigeria, and Vietnam has taught me about how differently the same problem gets solved in different parts of the world.

Rishi

P.S. The detention clock starts the moment the ship arrives. Not when you remember. Not when it’s convenient. The moment it arrives. Plan accordingly.

P.P.S. If your bank’s forex desk has never had to explain their margin to you in detail, they are probably charging you more than they should. Ask. Politely, but ask.

India today stands at a critical crossroads. It is the world’s most populous nation, one of the fastest-growing major economies, and home to a vast pool of engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs. Yet when measured by breakthrough technologies, globally valuable intellectual property, frontier patents, deep scientific research and world-leading technology companies, India continues to trail both China and the United States by a considerable margin.

The explanation is often reduced to a familiar statistic. India spends roughly 0.7 per cent of GDP on research and development, while China spends more than 2.5 per cent and the United States more than 3 per cent. But the problem is deeper than spending levels alone. The real difference lies in how nations organise themselves to take technological risks.

Innovation is fundamentally different from conventional investment. A road, bridge, refinery or power plant can be evaluated using established models. The outcomes are relatively predictable. Frontier research is different. Most projects fail. Many generate no commercial return for years. Some may take decades before their value becomes apparent. Yet a single breakthrough can create industries worth trillions of dollars.

The uncomfortable reality is that nations seeking technological leadership must be willing to fund failure.

This is where democratic governments face a challenge that authoritarian systems do not.

In a democracy, every rupee spent on speculative research competes with visible and immediate public needs. Citizens naturally ask whether scarce resources should fund uncertain technologies when there are roads to build, schools to improve, hospitals to modernise and welfare commitments to fulfil. If a government-backed research project fails after consuming hundreds or thousands of crores, questions are raised in Parliament, audits are conducted, headlines are written and political accountability follows.

As a result, bureaucracies often become risk-averse. Civil servants are rarely rewarded for supporting a project that succeeds fifteen years later. They are often criticised for supporting one that fails today.

China operates under a different model. It can evaluate innovation as a portfolio. If seventy projects fail, twenty survive and ten transform industries, the overall programme is considered successful. Democratic systems often focus on individual failures rather than portfolio outcomes.

Yet India does not need to imitate China’s political structure to compete with China technologically. Democracies have solved this problem before.

The United States built much of its technological leadership through institutions that were specifically designed to take risks. Agencies funded research that eventually led to the internet, GPS, semiconductors, advanced aerospace systems and biotechnology. Importantly, they accepted that many projects would fail.

India’s challenge is therefore not a shortage of talent or ambition. It is a shortage of institutions designed to absorb technological risk.

The country should consider creating a multi-decade National Frontier Technology Mission capitalised initially at ₹1 lakh crore. Such a mission should focus on artificial intelligence, advanced materials, semiconductors, robotics, energy storage, quantum technologies, biotechnology and other strategic sectors that are likely to define economic leadership in the coming decades.

Equally important is how such a mission is governed.

Investment decisions should be kept at arm’s length from routine ministerial and bureaucratic processes. Scientists, technologists, entrepreneurs, investors and industry experts should evaluate proposals through independent committees. Governments should define national priorities and provide capital, but they should not attempt to micromanage scientific decision-making.

The objective should not be to eliminate failure. The objective should be to ensure that failures occur within a disciplined portfolio designed to maximise long-term national returns.

India should also explore a new framework for sharing innovation risk.

Today, a promoter can obtain financing for a warehouse, commercial property or conventional manufacturing facility because the risks are understood and the assets can serve as collateral. Frontier technologies operate differently. A new battery chemistry, semiconductor architecture, biotechnology platform or artificial intelligence infrastructure project may require ten years of investment before producing meaningful revenue.

Banks cannot finance such risks. Insurance companies are not designed to do so. Mutual funds require liquidity and predictable returns. Venture capital funds play a critical role but often operate within finite fund cycles and cannot shoulder every long-duration scientific risk.

The result is a financing vacuum precisely where the nation needs investment the most.

One solution may be a combination of recoverable grants and innovation insurance. Under such a system, approved research projects would receive support from the state. If successful, part of the support could be repaid through royalties, revenue-sharing or licensing income. If the project fails despite meeting agreed scientific and technical milestones, the loss would be treated as part of the national innovation portfolio.

Such a framework would encourage entrepreneurs to pursue ambitious technologies without transferring all risk to private capital.

At the same time, the state should expand funding for institutions such as ISRO, IISc, national laboratories and leading universities. Around the world, many transformative technologies originated not inside corporations but inside publicly funded laboratories and research institutions.

However, governments should recognise an important distinction. The state is often effective at funding invention but less effective at commercialisation. The government’s comparative advantage lies in financing scientific uncertainty. The private sector’s comparative advantage lies in scaling products, serving customers, building markets and creating globally competitive businesses.

Rather than attempting to become a commercial operator, the state should focus on creating intellectual property and licensing it to industry wherever appropriate.

India must also address another structural issue: talent incentives.

Many of the country’s brightest engineers face a simple economic reality. Commercial careers often offer significantly higher compensation than research careers. If India expects more people to devote their lives to scientific discovery, advanced engineering and frontier research, the financial rewards must become more competitive. A nation cannot aspire to technological leadership while systematically underpaying many of the individuals responsible for creating it.

Finally, innovation thrives in ecosystems rather than isolation. China’s rise was not built solely on funding. It was built on clusters where universities, laboratories, suppliers, manufacturers, investors and logistics networks were located within the same regions. Such ecosystems dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of experimentation.

India should build similar deep-technology clusters around its strongest research institutions and industrial centres.

The twenty-first century will not be dominated simply by nations with large populations or low-cost labour. It will be shaped by countries that generate valuable intellectual property, create transformative technologies and build institutions capable of financing uncertainty over decades rather than quarters.

India already possesses the talent, entrepreneurial energy and capital required to compete. What remains to be built is an innovation architecture capable of supporting risk at scale. The question is no longer whether India can afford to invest aggressively in research and development. The more important question is whether it can afford not to.

Let me tell you about an invoice.

When Hemraj Group purchases raw materials, rice, machinery, stores, anything, an invoice arrives. A physical document, or a digital one, carrying the details of what was bought, from whom, at what price, on what terms.

Here is what used to happen to that invoice.

The purchase department received it first. They entered all the details into their system, for their own records, their own reference, their own tracking.

Then the invoice moved to the accounts department. Who entered all the details again. Different system. Same data. Second entry.

Then it moved to the payments department. Who entered all the details a third time. Same data. Third entry.

Three departments. Three data entries. Three separate opportunities for a human being to make a small mistake, a transposed number, a wrong date, a misread figure. And when that mistake happened, because it did happen, of course it did, someone had to find it. Which meant reconciliation. Which meant manpower. Which meant time. Which meant the loop starting all over again.

Multiply this by every invoice, every purchase, every transaction across multiple facilities, multiple geographies, multiple product lines.

That was Hemraj Group’s information infrastructure until about three to four years ago.

This is the story of what we did about it, and what I actually think about technology, AI, and the gap between the glamour and the reality.

Why We Never Implemented SAP

The conventional answer to the problem I just described is an ERP system. And the conventional ERP recommendation for a business of Hemraj’s size and complexity is SAP.

I looked at SAP. I looked at it seriously.

And then I walked away.

Here is my honest assessment of large ERP implementations for mid sized Indian businesses, based on watching many of them up close:

The implementation takes a minimum of one to two years. Sometimes more. During that time, your existing processes are disrupted, your people are confused, your operations are running on two parallel systems simultaneously, and nothing works cleanly.

The cost is significant, multiple crores, before you account for the inevitable customisations that every business requires because no ERP is built for your specific workflows.

And after all of that, the success rate is not what the vendors tell you it is. I have watched organisations spend two years and significant capital implementing SAP and still be unable to fully adopt it. The software is ready. The processes are not. The people are not. The gap between what the software expects and how your business actually runs is wider than anyone admitted at the start.

And then, because businesses change, because workflows evolve, because you are growing and the internal processes are always shifting, every change you need in the system requires a paid customisation. Which takes six months. Which costs separately. Which starts the cycle again.

I did not want to be in that cycle.

What I wanted was something small, cheap, customisable, low code, and self manageable. Something that fit around how we actually work rather than requiring us to rebuild how we work to fit around the software.

The Google Workspace Discovery

The answer, when it came, came from an upskilling session. Not a consultant. Not a technology vendor. An upskilling class I attended because staying current with what is happening in the world, beyond the day to day operations, is something I have always believed is non negotiable for anyone running a business.

Google Workspace. Specifically, Google Forms and Google Sheets.

The insight was simple. Instead of having different departments enter the same data into different systems, use a Form to capture the data once at the point of entry, and have it flow automatically into a Sheet that everyone can access and reference.

One entry. Multiple uses. Zero repetition.

The purchase department fills in the Form when the invoice arrives. That data populates the Sheet. The accounts department references the Sheet. The payments department references the same Sheet. The reconciliation happens automatically because everyone is working from the same single source of truth.

The number of repetitive tasks that this eliminated was significant. The reduction in manual errors was immediate. The cost, compared to SAP, was essentially zero.

Is it perfect? No. Is it as sophisticated as a full ERP implementation done well? No. But it works. It is running. It is customisable without a six month vendor engagement. And it did not require two years of organisational disruption to implement.

Sometimes the simple solution is the right solution. Touch your nose. Do not go around your face.

The AI Layer, And An Honest Conversation About ROI

Now we are adding an AI layer on top of the Sheets and the data. Agentic AI tools that can analyse, summarise, flag anomalies, automate reporting, reduce the manual work that still exists even after the Google Workspace implementation.

We are not there yet, not as efficiently as I would like. It is a work in progress. The technology is changing fast enough that what is optimal today may not be optimal in six months.

But here is something I want to say that I think is genuinely important. And I want to be especially clear that this is coming from someone who is simultaneously building an AI governance platform.

Do not run behind the glamour of AI.

The noise around artificial intelligence, the headlines, the breathless coverage, the case studies, the conference talks, creates a very specific kind of pressure on business owners and executives. The pressure to adopt. To implement. To be seen doing something with AI before your competitors do something with AI.

And in that pressure, something very basic gets forgotten.

The ROI calculation.

I have seen it happen, and I have experienced versions of it myself, where the cost of implementing an AI or agentic AI system, plus the cost of the mistakes it makes, plus the cost of the guardrails it breaks, plus the cost of fixing what it gets wrong, adds up to significantly more than the salary of the human employee who was doing the job before.

The AI is faster. The AI does not take lunch breaks or go on leave. The AI does not need to be managed in the traditional sense.

But the AI also makes mistakes in ways that humans do not. It breaks rules in ways that are harder to predict. It requires governance, monitoring, oversight, correction, that itself costs time and money. And when it goes wrong in an unmonitored environment, it can go very wrong very fast.

Ask anyone who has watched an AI agent delete a production database in nine seconds. (See two weeks ago’s post for that particular adventure.)

The question to ask before any AI implementation is not “can AI do this?” The answer to that question is almost always yes. The question is: what is the actual, fully loaded cost of the AI doing this, including the cost of errors and governance, compared to the current cost of a human doing it?

Sometimes the AI wins that calculation clearly. Sometimes it does not. And the businesses that rush to implement without doing that calculation are the ones that will write the cautionary tales.

The Real Challenge, People

Here is the thing that keeps the technology transformation genuinely difficult at Hemraj, and I suspect at most traditional businesses in India.

The gap between the person who understands the workflow and the person who understands the technology.

Our operational people, the ones who know how the rice mill actually runs, who understand the purchase process from years of doing it, who can spot an anomaly in an invoice because they have processed ten thousand of them, these are not technology people. They learned their craft on the ground. They are invaluable.

Our technology options, the tools, the AI systems, the automation platforms, require someone who understands them deeply enough to implement them correctly in a specific operational context.

The person who knows both, who has the practical operational knowledge AND the technology implementation knowledge, is extraordinarily rare. And even when you find them, communicating the nuance of a workflow that has evolved over decades to someone who has never worked in that industry is genuinely hard.

This fusion, practical workflow knowledge meeting technology implementation capability, is the real challenge of modernising a traditional business. Not the software. Not the cost. The people.

It is, if you think about it, the same lesson that runs through everything I have written in this newsletter. The technology is never the hard part. The people always are.

Where We Are. Where We Are Going.

Hemraj Group today runs on Google Forms, Google Sheets, Tally, Excel, and bank statements received over email. The WhatsApp voice messages are still there. Some things are deeply cultural and no software replaces a quick voice note between people who have worked together for years.

We are building the AI layer. Slowly. Carefully. With a clear eye on the ROI of every implementation rather than the glamour of it.

The goal is not to be the most technologically advanced agri commodity business in India. The goal is to have technology that makes better decisions possible, faster access to accurate data, cleaner reporting, fewer hours spent on reconciliation and more hours spent on the work that actually grows the business.

Four hundred Google Sheets is not where we want to end up. But it is considerably better than where we started. And the journey from chaos to clarity is always incremental, never instantaneous.

Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.

Your Turn

Two questions this week:

If you run a traditional business, what is your version of the invoice triangle? The process that everyone knows is inefficient but nobody has quite fixed yet?

And have you done the actual ROI calculation on an AI implementation in your business? What did you find?

Drop it in the comments. The honest answers are always the most useful ones.

See you next Friday. We are talking about exports, specifically, what it actually takes to build an export business from scratch, the mistakes most first time exporters make, and why the paperwork is simultaneously the most boring and most important part of the whole thing.

-Rishi

P.S. The person who can bridge the gap between operational knowledge and technology implementation is the most valuable hire in any traditional business right now. If you find one, keep them. Pay them well. Do not let them leave.

P.P.S. Four hundred Google Sheets sounds like a lot. It is a lot. But every single one of them is doing something. Which is more than I can say for some SAP implementations I have watched.

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I want to talk about inheritance today.

Not the legal kind. Not the financial kind. The other kind. The weight of it, the privilege of it, the responsibility of it, and the question that every next-generation business person eventually has to sit quietly with and answer honestly.

What do you owe the people who built what you inherited?

And what do you owe yourself?

I have been thinking about this for sixteen years. I do not have a clean answer. But I have an honest one. And honest, as you know by now, is the only currency this newsletter trades in.

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The Day I Walked Into The Office

When I joined Hemraj Group, the primary feeling was not excitement. It was not pride, though pride came later. It was not even gratitude, though I feel that deeply now.

It was responsibility.

Heavy, immediate, unavoidable responsibility.

I am the only child of my father. My father is the only child of my grandfather. Three generations of a single family line, and at each point, one person to carry it forward. I did not choose this in the way you choose a career or a city or a passion project. I was born into it. The choice, if it could be called that, was made long before I arrived.

And yet, this is important, I have never resented it. Not for a single day.

Because I understood, from the very beginning, that what I was inheriting was not just a business. It was a source of livelihood for hundreds of families. The workers. The employees. The contractors. The suppliers. The buyers. The farmers who sell to us. The communities that exist around our plants. Hemraj Group is not just a company on a balance sheet. It is an ecosystem. And the person at the top of that ecosystem carries all of it.

That understanding changes how you show up. It changes what the office means to you. For me, and I mean this without any drama or exaggeration, the business is a place of worship. You walk in with the same seriousness, the same reverence, the same sense that something larger than yourself is depending on you getting this right.

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The Validation Question

Here is something that nobody talks about openly in family business circles, but that every next-generation business person knows intimately.

The need to prove that you deserve to be there.

Not to yourself, though that too. To everyone else. To the employees who knew your father before they knew you. To the suppliers who built relationships with your grandfather. To the industry, which has a very long memory and very clear eyes about whether the next generation has what it takes.

The question hanging over every second, third, or fourth-generation business person is always the same:

Are you here because of your family, or are you here because you are capable?

And the only answer that works, the only answer that actually silences the question, is not words. It is years. It is showing up every day, starting from the grassroots, understanding the business from the bottom up, making decisions that work, building on what was left to you rather than coasting on it.

I started from the beginning. Not because I had to. I could have walked in and sat at the top. But because I understood that the validation I needed could only be earned one way. By doing the work. By knowing the business the way my father knew it and his father knew it. Not from a boardroom but from the floor.

Sixteen years later, I believe I have earned my seat. Not because I say so. Because the business has grown. Because the people around me trust me. Because the decisions have worked more often than they have not.

That validation matters. Not for ego. For the ability to lead with authority rather than with title. There is a very big difference between the two.

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The Independence Myth

I want to say something about a trend I have watched with growing frustration.

There is a generation of next-generation business people, in India and across the world, who have decided not to join their family businesses because they want to be independent. To create their own identity. To build something that is entirely theirs, untouched by the shadow of what came before.

I think this is, with great respect, completely misguided.

Let me explain why.

No one is truly independent. Not one person alive. You are dependent on the farmers who grow your food. On the transport companies that deliver it. On the infrastructure that connects your city. On the government that maintains the roads. On the engineers who built the bridges. On the doctors who keep you healthy. On the teachers who educated you. Independence, in its pure form, belongs only to the person who lives alone in a forest, grows their own food, builds their own shelter with their own hands from natural materials, and needs nothing from anyone.

That is not any of us. That has never been any of us.

So when a next-generation business person says, “I want to be independent. I want my own identity,” what they are really saying is: I want the credit to be mine alone. I want the origin story to start with me.

And I understand that impulse. I do. The desire to be the author of your own story is deeply human.

But here is what that thinking gets wrong.

Your identity does not have to begin with you to belong to you. Taking a sixty-seven-year-old business and growing it into something it has never been before, that is your identity. That is your authorship. That is the story that begins with you, even if the first chapter was written by someone else.

And beyond the identity question, there is the practical reality. The head start that a family business gives you is not just financial, though it is financial. It is relational, reputational, and institutional. The CEO who earns one crore a year will watch their child start from twenty thousand a month as an intern and spend twenty-five years climbing back to where the parent was. The business family’s next generation starts from exactly where the previous generation left off.

That is not luck. That is compound inheritance. And walking away from it to prove a point about independence is one of the most expensive decisions a person can make.

By all means, prove yourself. Earn your place. Build something new alongside what was built before. That is identity. That is independence, properly understood.

But do not discard the foundation to build the house. That is not independence. That is waste.

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What Gets Passed Down That Has No Price

Here is what I actually inherited from Hemraj Group. Not the plants or the cash flows or the trade relationships.

The dining table conversations.

The stories my grandfather told. The way my father explained a decision. Not the decision itself, but the reasoning behind it, the values that produced it, the principle that would outlast the specific situation. The feel of a room where business is being discussed by people who have been doing it for decades and care about it the way other people care about their faith.

You cannot put a number on this. You cannot put it in a due diligence document or a balance sheet or a management presentation. But it is the most valuable thing that passes from one generation to the next in a family business. The unspoken curriculum. The values and principles that shape how you see every situation before your analytical brain has even started working.

Keep your word. Guard your reputation. Do not be compulsive. Hire people better than you. Watch your costs every single day. Never bet the whole company on anything. Stay humble because money changes pockets easily, and the person with nothing today may have everything tomorrow.

I did not learn these things in a classroom. I absorbed them at a table, over chai, from people who had lived them and paid for them with real money and real consequences.

That is the inheritance that actually matters. That is what I carry into every decision I make. At Hemraj, at GAPB, in every investment, and in every negotiation.

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My Daughter

I want to end with something I have not talked about publicly before.

I have a daughter. She does not live with me. The circumstances of my personal life are what they are, and I have made peace with them. But she is always present in how I think about what I am building and why.

When I think about what I want to pass to her, it is not Hemraj. It is not GAPB. It is not the investments or the assets or the balance sheet.

It is the values.

The same values my grandfather passed to my father. The same values my father passed to me over sixteen years of working alongside him, arguing with him twenty times a day, and watching him be right more often than I wanted him to be.

Whether she joins the business, I genuinely do not know. I will not compel her the way circumstance compelled me. She will have the choice I did not fully have. Whatever her passion is, whatever direction her life takes, I want her to pursue it freely and with full support.

But I also carry a quiet hope. That she finds her way to it. That she sees in Hemraj what I see. Not a burden, not an obligation, but a privilege. A place of worship. Something worth caring for.

And if she does not, I hope she carries the values anyway. Because the values are the real inheritance. Everything else is just the vehicle they travel in.

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The Question I Want To Leave You With

If you are from a family business, what is the one thing you inherited that has no price? Not the business. The other thing. The value, the habit, the way of seeing, the story told over dinner that you have never forgotten.

And if you are building something new, what are you hoping to pass on that will outlast you?

Drop it in the comments. This is the conversation I most want to have this week.

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See you next Friday. We are talking about something completely different. The role of technology in transforming a traditional business, and what Hemraj’s automation journey has actually looked like from the inside.

Spoiler: it involves approximately four hundred Google Sheets.

Rishi

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P.S. The dining table is where the real education happens. If you still have access to the people who built what you inherited, sit with them more. Ask more questions. The curriculum has an expiry date.

P.P.S. To my daughter, if she reads this one day, the door is always open. Whatever you choose, I am proud of you already.

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You have Hemraj Group — sixty-seven years old, multiple geographies, established cash flows. You have GAPB. You have semiconductor investments. You are looking at Africa expansion, at pharma CDMOs, at rare earth magnets, at lithium battery recycling. You are evaluating startups to angel invest in.

How do you decide? What is the actual framework?

Here is the honest answer: it is not a framework. It is a set of questions. Asked in a specific order. With a very low tolerance for the wrong answers in the early ones.

Let me walk you through it.

The Questions I Ask Before Anything Else

Before a spreadsheet is opened. Before a financial model is built. Before due diligence is commissioned or lawyers are engaged or anyone is asked to prepare a presentation — I ask these questions. And if the answers are wrong, nothing that comes after them matters.

Question one: Are the policy tailwinds real?

Is the central government — in India, or wherever the opportunity is — genuinely supportive of this industry? Not just rhetorically supportive. Not just a budget line or a minister’s speech. Actually, structurally, putting capital and policy behind it?

This matters for two reasons. The obvious one: policy support means cheaper capital, tax incentives, regulatory clearances that move faster, a favourable environment for growth. The less obvious one: government conviction about an industry is itself a signal. Governments, for all their flaws, have access to information about strategic national needs that most private operators do not. When a government decides an industry is critical — semiconductor manufacturing, renewable energy, AI governance, defence production — they are usually right about the strategic importance even when they are wrong about the execution details.

I want policy behind me. Not because I need the government to run my business. But because rowing with the current is considerably easier than rowing against it.

Question two: Is the product essential?

Not useful. Not nice-to-have. Not something that will do well in a good market. Essential.

Will this product be in consistent demand for the next several decades? Is it fundamental to the functioning of an economy — any economy, every economy? Is it something that countries need regardless of whether they are growing fast or growing slowly, regardless of political cycles, regardless of which technology wave is currently fashionable?

Rice. Edible oils. Semiconductors. Medicines. Energy. These are essential. The demand does not disappear in a downturn. The need does not evaporate when sentiment shifts. If the product is essential, you have a foundation. If it is not — you have a bet on conditions staying favourable, which is a very different and much more dangerous thing.

Question three: Is there a shortage?

A good product in a balanced market is a fine business. A good product in a supply-constrained market is an exceptional business.

I want to enter markets where demand exceeds supply — where the product is needed more than it is available. Shortage means pricing power. Shortage means customers come to you rather than you going to them. Shortage means margins that exist not because of clever management but because of structural reality.

Find the shortage. That is where the opportunity lives.

Question four: Is this central to India’s sovereignty and growth ambitions?

This one might sound abstract but it is deeply practical.

India is on a specific journey — toward becoming a global superpower, toward self-sufficiency in the industries that matter, toward reducing dependence on China and other geopolitical rivals for critical inputs. The industries that are central to that journey — semiconductors, rare earth magnets, AI infrastructure, defence manufacturing, green energy, pharmaceutical innovation — will receive disproportionate support, disproportionate capital, and disproportionate policy attention for the next several decades.

Being in those industries is not just patriotic. It is strategically smart. The tailwinds are generational, not cyclical.

Question five: What is my unfair advantage?

This is the question most people skip in their excitement about an opportunity. They see the market, they see the shortage, they see the policy support — and they assume that is enough.

It is not enough.

Why are you — specifically, you, with your specific background, your specific relationships, your specific capital, your specific knowledge — better positioned than anyone else to capture this opportunity? What do you have that others do not? What can you do that others cannot, or cannot do as well, or cannot do as cheaply?

In Hemraj’s Nigeria operations — the unfair advantage was industry knowledge. We knew rice. We knew solvent extraction. We knew edible oils. We were entering a new geography with a difficult operating environment, yes — but in an industry we had been running for sixty years. The geography was new. The expertise was not.

Without an unfair advantage, you are not an entrepreneur. You are a gambler.

The Filter That Kills More Opportunities Than Any Other

Here is the thing about all five questions above. They are about the opportunity. They tell you whether the market is good.

But the question that kills more opportunities than any other is not about the market at all.

It is about execution.

Who is going to run this?

I am based in Kolkata. When I see opportunities in Bangalore, in Chennai, in Mumbai, in Gujarat — good opportunities, real opportunities, opportunities that tick many of the boxes above — the question I almost always cannot answer satisfactorily is: who will manage this business day to day? Who will own it, watch it, be present in it, make the thousand small decisions that determine whether a business survives its early years?

I cannot manage a business in Chennai from Kolkata. Not properly. Not the way it needs to be managed. And I have learned — from experience, from watching others, from the micromanagement lesson I talked about a few weeks ago — that a new business without close oversight in its early stages is a business that is quietly failing while everyone is too busy or too distant to notice.

So I walk away. Not because the opportunity is bad. Because I cannot find — or cannot attract — the right person to run it.

This is the filter that never makes it into business school frameworks. It is not about TAM or IRR or competitive moats. It is about the most basic question in business: is there a capable human being who will show up every day and make this work?

Find that person first. Then evaluate the opportunity. Not the other way around.

The Elon Musk Nose Problem

Let me tell you about common sense. Because I think it is the most underrated thing in business, and the most consistently absent.

Elon Musk has a famous practice when he sits with his rocket engineers — the best in the world, recruited from the top universities, with decades of experience between them. His primary job in those sessions is not to solve technical problems. It is to identify complexity that should not exist.

His question, essentially, is always: why are we going all the way around when we could go straight?

If you want to touch your nose, you touch your nose. You do not route your hand around your entire face in an elaborate arc that demonstrates how technically sophisticated your arm movements are. You just touch your nose.

Technical people — brilliant, credentialed, genuinely expert technical people — have a specific and very consistent tendency to solve simple problems in complex ways. Not because the complex solution is better. But because complexity signals expertise. It demonstrates that they know things others do not. It makes the simple look difficult and therefore makes them look indispensable.

Business is full of this. Processes that exist because nobody questioned whether they needed to. Reports that are generated because they have always been generated. Meetings that happen because they are in the calendar. Costs that are incurred because stopping them would require a decision and continuing them requires nothing.

Common sense says: if it does not need to exist, remove it. If it can be done simply, do it simply. If the complexity is not adding value, it is subtracting it.

Common sense, as someone once told me, is not very common.

The businesses that grow — really grow, sustainably, over decades — are almost always the ones that keep things simple. That resist the temptation to add complexity as a signal of sophistication. That ask, again and again, whether the way they are doing something is the simplest way it could be done.

It is not glamorous. It is not the subject of conference talks. But sixty-seven years of Hemraj Group says it works.

The Geography Versus Industry Matrix

One more thing I have learned about evaluating opportunities — and I think this is genuinely underappreciated.

The world is at different stages of development in different places. North America, Europe, Australia — mature, developed, sophisticated economies where the traditional industries are largely consolidated and the real opportunities are in new age sectors: AI, biotech, advanced manufacturing, clean energy, deep technology.

Asia — catching up fast. The Middle East, Southeast Asia, China, India — all moving rapidly up the value chain, creating opportunities in both traditional and new age industries simultaneously.

Africa and Latin America — where Asia was thirty to fifty years ago. The traditional industries that are saturated in the developed world are wide open here. Food processing. Basic manufacturing. Infrastructure. Logistics. The fundamentals that every economy needs but that these continents have not yet built at scale.

This matrix changes how I think about every opportunity.

A rice milling opportunity in France makes no sense — the market is saturated, the margins are thin, the competition is entrenched. The same opportunity in Nigeria makes sense — because the gap between supply and demand is enormous, competition is thin, and the market is growing.

A new age AI governance platform makes sense in India — because the regulatory environment is developing, the market is large and underserved, and India is at exactly the right stage of digital maturity for this product. The same product in rural Nigeria makes no sense — the infrastructure does not support it yet.

Geography and industry together determine opportunity. Neither alone is sufficient. And the best opportunities exist at the intersection of the right industry for the right geography at the right moment in that geography’s development.

The One Thing I Would Never Change

People sometimes ask me — given everything, given the mistakes and the losses and the deals that didn’t work out — what would you do differently?

My honest answer: nothing.

Not because everything has been perfect. Far from it. But because what I am today — the judgment I have, the pattern recognition, the discipline, the ability to ask the right questions before opening a spreadsheet — is the direct product of every decision that was made before me and by me. My grandfather’s decisions. My father’s decisions. My own.

The losses taught me as much as the wins. The bad decisions taught me more than the good ones. The compulsive mistakes — the ones my father still brings up at the dinner table with precise and loving detail — are the reason I am not compulsive anymore.

You do not get the wisdom without the tuition. And the tuition, in business, is always paid in real money.

Your Turn

Two questions this week:

What is the first question you ask when evaluating a new opportunity — before anything else, before any analysis? What is your equivalent of my policy tailwinds filter?

And — have you ever walked away from something genuinely good purely because you could not find the right person to run it? How did that feel?

Drop it in the comments. This is one of those conversations where I learn as much from the replies as you do from the piece.

See you next Friday. We are talking about something I have been thinking about a lot lately — what does the next generation of a family business actually owe the generations that built it? And what does it owe itself?

This one might be the most honest thing I have written yet.

— Rishi

P.S. The simplest path is almost always the right one. Touch your nose. Do not go around your face. This applies to rockets, businesses, and most things in life.

P.P.S. Common sense is not very common. But it is learnable. Start by asking, every day, whether the way you are doing something is the simplest way it could be done. The answers will surprise you.