Hinduja Group to double investment in UAE

When Parmanand Deepchand Hinduja moved to Mumbai from his birthplace Shikarpur in Sindh province in 1914 at the age of 14 to start a family business, he did not know what was in store, or where it would lead his family.
Today, Hinduja’s business is still growing. The group’s annual profit is in excess of US$25 billion, with an enterprise value exceeding US$35 billion that is spread across 35 countries with 72,000 employees on its payroll. Its businesses include oil and gas, downstream energy, power, automotive, trading, infrastructure, banking and financial services, real estate, health care, media and information technology. The group’s products and services are spread across 100 countries.
His eldest living son, Srichand P. Hinduja, chairman of Hinduja group of companies, has just outranked the world’s richest steel tycoon Lakhsmi Mittal as the wealthiest Asian businessman in the U.K., according to the Financial Times. He is worth US$8.3 billion. In the global wealth list, Forbes ranks Hinduja as the 126th richest billionaire among the world’s 1,342 billionaires.
In 1984, the group acquired the Gulf Oil brand, closely followed by the acquisition of Indian automotive manufacturer Ashok Leyland in 1987, which was the first major non-resident Indian (NRI) investment in India. The Hindujas turned around Ashok Leyland to a US$2 billion company. With 150,000 units manufactured annually, today, it is the world’s fourth largest commercial vehicle brand, No. 2 in India. It has a 72% market share in the UAE’s school bus market.
While other organizations have been cutting costs during the global recession, the Hindujas last year invested US$1.1 billion in acquiring Houghton International, the U.S. lubricant and specialized chemicals group that has been a market leader in its field.
However, after shifting bases from the East to the West, the Hinduja brothers are shifting their focus back on the East, especially in India — their home turf and the Gulf — due to growing opportunities there. They had earlier pledged to pump in US$50 billion into India’s power, energy, infrastructure and real estate sectors, to tap into these opportunities.
The governments of India and the UAE are currently getting ready to sign a bilateral investment protection agreement (BIPA), which will encourage greater investment from the UAE into India and create a win-win situation for both, Hinduja says.
(April 12, 2013)