Airline boss spreads his wings
Naresh Goyal, the founder of Jet Airways, is one of a wave of Indian tycoons who are aiming to take on the world - outside of outsourcing
THEY have become something of a cultural cliché: outsourced Indian call centres, dealing, sometimes unintelligibly, with punters from Poole trying to solve problems that once were dealt with closer to home. The image is unfair, you might argue, but it has stuck. India is conquering the outsourcing world.
More to the point, it may be only a taste of things to come. If China seems set on domination in manufacturing, India has made its métier the wider services industry. And, again, it is taking aim at Britain.
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“The UK is one of our main targets,” says Naresh Goyal, the founder of Jet Airways. “It has so much in common with India, in part because of the historical ties. One great thing you gave us is the language.”
Goyal, 57, is one of the emerging breed of Indian billionaire entrepreneurs leading the charge. Fellow members of India Inc include the Ambani brothers, who recently split the family’s Reliance Industries conglomerate in two after a protracted dispute. Sunil Mittal, the founder and chief executive of Bharti, the telecoms group in which Vodafone bought a 10 per cent stake in October, is another. Although little known in Britain, they will probably become well-known business figures in the next decade as India looks to broaden its dominance away from outsourcing.
Goyal and his peers see their futures as linked. “In India, everybody knows everybody, it is the way we operate,” he says. “And we are all working together to promote India Inc.”
Goyal, for his part, is working to introduce the first flights to India from regional airports in Britain after the Indian Government this month cleared his proposed $500 million (£285 million) takeover of the rival Air Sahara to create the country’s biggest airline by far. In what would mark the beginning of a new generation of provincial flights to India, Goyal plans to begin services from Manchester and Birmingham next year.
Britain has 1.42 million people of Indian ancestry, who make up a large percentage of the passengers flying to India. However, the proportion of passengers with no connection to India is increasing, as the country’s rapid economic growth creates a more general interest in the country as a holiday destination.
About 1.5 million people are expected to fly from Britain to India in the year to October, according to the Civil Aviation Authority, nearly triple the 641,250 recorded five years ago.
Goyal has amassed an estimated $1.9 billion fortune since setting up Jet Airways in 1993, shortly after India kick-started its programme of economic liberalisation.
In a fast-growing economy, demand for domestic flights has surged in the past decade, with year-on-year growth hitting 40 per cent in the first three months of this year.
Goyal, who lives with his wife and teenage son and daughter in a house overlooking Regent’s Park — a far cry from his impoverished childhood dwelling in Patiala, in the state of Punjab — has tapped that demand. By 2002, Jet Airways had become India’s biggest domestic airline. He says: “Most people in India had never dreamt of flying, which was the preserve of business people and the elite. But the growing economy, combined with lower fares as a result of increasing competition and a young population, has led to a huge growth in the market.”
Jet Airways floated on the Bombay Stock Exchange in March last year and began flying to London two months later, after the British and Indian governments loosened the restrictions on which carriers could fly between the two countries.
Jet Airways presently flies from Delhi and Bombay to Heathrow, but it plans to add a new route in July from Amritsar, in Punjab. Its international flights are confined to Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Kathmandu, Colombo and London, but Goyal has ordered 20 new aircraft worth about $2.5 billion and plans many more routes.
The United States, which has about two million people of Indian descent, is Jet Airways’ other main target and Goyal plans to begin flying from India to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco over the next two to three years. Over the same period he aims to introduce flights to Zurich, Rome, Frankfurt, Paris, Brussels, Madrid, Shanghai, Beijing, Bangkok, Johannesburg, Mauritius, Nairobi, Toronto and Vancouver.
Goyal can trace his business empire to the streets of Punjab, where, from the age of 10, he would accompany his father, a jewellery dealer, as he hawked his wares. “I learnt how to think like a businessman and how to behave. My father was very polite, humble and courteous and people respected him for that. You can’t do business without respect and you can’t just ask for it, it has to be earned.”
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