“Strike in our China unit lasted for few hours, govt was responsive”

By Japan K Pathak, Ahmedabad, 7 November, 2011

Last week I attended one more insightful conference at Indian Institute of Management(IIM) Ahmedabad. It was a two-day conference ‘IIMA ConneXion’ organized under the title of ‘Thought leadership’ by Post Graduate Programme for Executives(PGPX) department of IIMA. I have reported this conference in Gujarat Samachar in Gujarati text. Here on DeshGujarat, I am putting it in English in this online series.Here is the second post of the series.It contains glimpses of Philips India’s Managing Director Rajeev Chopra’s speech:

Let’s look at some ongoing trends at present. Earlier government’s focus was not focused on infrastructure development. But now there is some focus over public infrastructure. And government is increasingly looking for public private partnership(PPP). Another trend is environmental concerns. Government wants to grow, however there are environmental concerns. Companies will have to address and respond to environmental concerns while preparing plans and executing them. One more significant trend is about regulatory changes and change in goods and service tax. We have 32 warehouses countrywide, but once new GST regime is in place, we will have lesser warehouses.

-From where the growth will come? It will come from middle class which was limited to big cities 10-15 years back. But middle class is now emerging in small villages too. The other area from where we will get growth is young population that is exposed to west due to TV. This triggers increasing aspirations but remember, there are limited means. In nut shell increasing rural incomes and large and growing middle class will drive the market.

-Let’s talk about Phillips. It is 100-yead old company. In India it entered before 80 years. Though it is largely known as consumer electronics company the fact is that as per our 2010 sales figures, our 35% sales is in lighting, 39% in health care, 26% in consumer lifestyle. In India our company has 55% sales in lighting while health care and electronics are distributed equally in rest portion.

-In lighting the future is LED, and our 35% research and development strength is employed in LED area. LED will be the game changer in the world of lighting. The other key word in this area will be Solar. In future there will be an era of intelligent lighting. You walk in a corridor and lighting will switch on
automatically.

-Once I received a call from our factory manager in China. He told me that there was strike in China unit of Phillips but the issue will be sorted out by tomorrow. Next day the strike ended. Our manager informed that he had met local government officials and told them that Phillips was 2nd big investor there and it was facing strike problem. The local government sent envoy to each and every labour in the night itself instructing that whatever the problem it should be solved through dialogue and there must not be any strike. The government is such responsive there in China, but if you ask what Maruti faced here in India, I am sure you will get completely a different story.

-There’s a difference of speed and vision between China and India.

-Those who talk about our inability to organize Common wealth games well, should also know that we could built F1 track very well in couple of years and the game ended very smoothly without any problem. The difference was that it was private sector that did the job of F1.

-I wonder why Germany and China are leading the research in Solar, when the best sun presence is here in India and middle east? Ideally, we the people should led research in solar energy.