Quick on the uptake

The ability to recognise the sign of the times has been his personal mantra for success, says Deepak J Babani, CEO of the Eros Group

It’s a story that rings out with its familiar sense of déjà vu. That of an expat coming to Dubai with a heartfelt intent: working here for a few years, gaining some “international experience” — and then returning ‘home’.

At first, it’s a two- to three-year stint he considers. Then, he squares it up to five. Then, the double-digit figure of 10 looms up. Before long — and we all know life moves at breakneck speed in this part of the world — this becomes the home stretch.

In the case of Deepak J Babani, chief executive officer of the Dh3.7-billion Eros Group, that’s 
pretty much the way it played out. Only, he didn’t really work towards setting up the formulaic plot like it happens in most other cases.

It happened, as he puts it, “accidentally”.

A ‘providential accident’

At the Eros corporate office in Deira, Babani is a picture of effervescence: clearly, he loves his job, being in the thick of things. He’s been steering Eros — one of the leading players in consumer electronics, telecom and allied multi-products in the Middle East — for more than 30 years now, and has no plans of throwing in the towel for the foreseeable future. “One of my uncles, who is 80 now, retired from an active daily routine only last year proving you are never too old to call it a day; like him, my work too is my daily pep pill.” There was a time though, when he thought he’d retire young — at 45 or 50 — he says with a laugh; didn’t quite turn out that way.

The story he tells us starts at a time when he was in his 20s. Young Babani — a graduate from the 
Manipal Institute of Technology in Karnataka, India — was working in sales and marketing for Murphy in the city that used to be called Bombay. “This was back in the Seventies… a lot of my parents’ friends were based in Dubai, they had their businesses here, and they kept inviting me to come over and explore opportunities,” he sits back and recounts. But he was too focussed on being in Bombay, “the Middle East wasn’t really a hot market”, and he was loving his tenure with Murphy.

One “fine day” in 1978, he was travelling by bus from the VT station to Colaba, to meet a dealer. He didn’t get a place to sit, so, as he stood in one corner of the bus with a newspaper in his hand, his eyes strayed to the classifieds jobs column. ‘Walk-in 
interviews being conducted for openings in the Middle East’, an insertion read. “I did give it a once-over, but without much interest.”

He got off the bus and arrived at the dealer’s office to be told the dealer had stepped out for a while, and would be back in 45 minutes. “I don’t know what came over me… On a whim, I decided to go for this interview.” If nothing, it would kill time. He wasn’t carrying his bio-data (as CVs were called those days), so hurriedly wrote it out on a piece of paper.

As it turned out, the interview went swimmingly; Babani was offered a job on the spot. “And in three months’ time, I was here in Dubai.”

It’s still a haze how it happened. One thing is for sure: it all happened “suddenly”.

Leap of faith

Babani looks back at his first job in Dubai with a lot of fondness. “My career in Jumbo was professionally very rewarding — it was a new geographical area, a new business, new technology… Socially, I didn’t have much of a life, but I had told myself that 
two-three years down the line, I would go back home to Bombay and help my dad with the family business.”

His job was “diverse”. “Though I was in charge of sales and marketing, I had this power of absorption… I was soon interacting with people across departments, meeting principals… did a very large business for Jumbo. But after some time [two and a half years], everybody said I was selling Sony, it’s very easy, and anybody can do it… I was this close to believing my lessons had been learnt, and I should head back [to Bombay].”

Babani had probably reckoned that the ‘challenge’ had fizzled out. And then, as if on cue, a job opened up at Eros.

“When I joined Eros in 1981, the [new] challenge was that the company was very small — it had 10 employees, the turnover was Dh6 million… the staff was old-school, needed to be trained… the structure had to be reorganised.”

In Jumbo, he was focussed on Sony videos; at Eros, he landed himself a much larger portfolio: electronics and appliances. And, of course, at times it was frustrating when he considered the numbers: “The sales volume [at Eros] was very small… imagine coming from a Dh350million business to a Dh6million one…” But he managed to convert that into an advantage by viewing it as yet another “learning experience”.

“We had one showroom in Deira,” he remembers, “and I did everything: from collecting cheques to going on sales calls, doing purchases, delivering products… There were only two vans so, many times, after work hours, I’d take my car — a station wagon — and ferry stuff to dealers myself.”

He didn’t mind being Jack of all trades, says Babani, because of the sense of ownership he felt. “I treated it like my own business… My family values [coming from a business background] stood me in good stead.”

The milestones

That was the beginning of the Eros 
journey. “It was exciting: I used to eat, drink, sleep work… those were heady days.” He soon realised there was a lot of business potential in Abu Dhabi, whereas Eros was mainly Dubai/Sharjah-focussed. “I suggested to the owners 
we put up a store in Abu Dhabi; they weren’t terribly excited about it [it was tough doing business there at that time was their reasoning] but they let me have my way… I was actually given a lot 
flexibility by the owners at a period when, monetarily, we were still trying to find our feet.”

Sacrifices had to be made obviously. “[While searching for office space] we couldn’t afford to pay brokerage fees… so during lunch time — everything would be shut down between 1pm and 4pm, we had a three-hour lunch break — I would comb the streets of Abu Dhabi for ‘To Let’ signs to identify an office space. This was in peak summer… But the most important thing was: we got an office.” It was a move that paid off richly: in the years to follow, Abu Dhabi would emerge as a winning market.

Hitachi was the brand Babani fought tooth and nail for. “Between 1981 
and 1987-88, I focussed on Hitachi, making it a Dh400 million business.” With the video boom on in right earnest, colour TVs were in big demand. Despite jostling for space by biggies like Sony, Sanyo and Panasonic, in 1991 “we reached a market share of 25-26 per cent, which possibly was the highest market share in the world that Hitachi had… We managed to convert the brand into a high-recall one with strategic marketing campaigns focussing on its quality/ manufacturing strengths, striking 
up good relations with dealers and 
imparting training to staff on technical and soft skills”.

Another small milestone was getting the agency for Lennox aircons, he says, “which gave us good growth between 1988 and 1991”. That said, Babani admits “we missed out on the IT boom... Because margins in the IT sector were very low, we reckoned it did not fit in with our structure… ”

In 1998, Eros sales had dipped; 
between 1990 and 1995-96, the Japanese yen became very strong, so it was expensive to get in products from Japan, and Hitachi had been slow in moving factories overseas. Eros needed another growth engine. “That’s the time when Samsung came into the picture… In 1998, we took up the distribution for Samsung fax machines and PABX systems. Then, in 1999, it was the mobile business, followed by plasma and LCD television distribution rights in 2002… Things looked up again.”

In 2007, Eros was a Dh1.5-billion company; it was time to think big. 
“We formed business development teams to source new products and brands… and we decided to get into IT — it was an incremental business, and we could now afford to operate on slightly lower margins.” At that time, most 
IT products were sold in the IT market, electronics shops were just emerging into power retail (“Plug-Ins was the 
only retail store then”); “if you wanted to buy a laptop, there was no dedicated staff selling you the stuff at a one-stop shop and explaining its uses… We 
also saw there was convergence coming into the business: technology and IT were merging — so mobile could do 
music, could record… This was a segment that we missed out, it was time to get into it.”

Eros took up the distribution for 
Samsung IT to help them get into the consumer space (“earlier, we handled the business for Samsung but only covered the IT market”). “We added products like Cisco, Linksys into our portfolio, which had synergy with IT side… In 2009, when the entire market shrunk completely, we grew by 45 per cent.”

sushmita@khaleejtimes.com