"WE WILL EXCEED OUR TARGET OF QUADRUPLING PROFITABILITY"

DEVANSH JAIN, Executive Director, InoxGFL, in conversation with Noor Fathima Warsia, Group Editorial Director, BW Businessworld, discusses scale, discipline, and why the energy transition is both a professional and personal mission

- Fathima Warsia

You have steered the group with a remarkably capital-efficient approach in what is traditionally a CapEx-heavy sector. You have scaled aggressively while avoiding over-leverage. How have you maintained this discipline?

I would say that, as a group, we are very averse to debt. First, we keep extremely tight control over supply chain costs and capital costs. Second, there is no leakage. If you are overloading or cutting corners, as some do, costs balloon and inefficiencies creep in. We are very diligent about this. Corporate governance is paramount to us, and we maintain close control over CapEx and supply chain costs, managing them with precision.

Third, scale is critical. When you are building on a large scale, you can negotiate better terms and pricing. What matters most to us is scale. If I build a small business, it will not give me the necessary leverage in terms of market power, regulatory influence, or operational control.

In every business we are in, we are number one, two, or three. That position is important. So, when you put it all together, which is tight control over costs, solid execution with no inefficiencies, strong corporate governance, and scale, it gives us very disciplined leverage on capital costs.

Some of the world's most respected investors, including Capital Group, Prudential, and DSP, have backed your growth. How do you cultivate trust at the group level while managing such diverse verticals?

There may be a couple of factors to that. First, we walk the talk. Over the past three years, we have been among the best-performing stocks in the country across our We have committed to targets, and although many did not believe us at the time, we have delivered on them. The turnaround was extremely difficult, virtually impossible, some would have said, but we achieved it.