He’s in expansion mode. After reconquering the paper market, which BILT, his flagship company, had long dominated and then lost, he has branched into agriculture and farming. And now, there’s a buzz that he may soon acquire the financial services arm of a bank. If the deal does happen, it will mark a return of sorts to an old family domain—the Thapars controlled Oriental Bank of Commerce before it was nationalised.
Gautam Thapar
From being a fringe member of the Thapar family to the head of its most powerful branch, Gautam Thapar has come a long way. He cut his teeth in the group by turning around Ballarpur Industries, and has taken the group’s turnover to beyond $3 billion (Rs 12,900 crore). L.M. Thapar’s nephew—he is the son of Lalit Mohan Thapar’s elder brother, Brij Mohan Thapar—has shown that suffering fools is not his core competence.BILT is a unique case study, where the competitor company, responsible for its depleting market share—Sinar Mas Pulp and Paper India, a subsidiary of the Indonesian paper giant, Asia Pulp and Paper—was acquired by the runner-up in the marketplace for Rs 530 crore.
Name: Gautam Thapar Age: 47 Designation: Chairman Company: Avantha Group |
Known to be aggressive in his professional dealings, Thapar, who is obsessively media-shy, has rebuilt the empire left to him by LMT, overshadowing all other branches of the Thapar family—diversifying into power generation and IT.
The renaming of the group as Avantha marks a clean cut from the past. LMT, as a member of the Bombay Club, fought against liberalisation.
But the younger Thapar is spreading his wings globally, having acquired Malaysia’s Sabah Forest Industries for $261 million (Rs 1,122.3 crore), Belgian Intergarden Group and Belgian power equipment company, Pauwels, for a little over m32 million (Rs 214.4 crore).
—Tejeesh N.S. Behl
