How Gen 5 Is Reimagining

The 117-year-old Murugappa Group 

- Venkatesha Babu

The Murugappa Group headquarters in Chennai – Dare House – is located in Parry’s Corner, a landmark in the port city. It’s named after a Welsh merchant Thomas Parry, who set up EID Parry in 1787, a company the Murugappas acquired in 1981 from a clutch of institutional investors and successfully turned around. Today, EID Parry is a major national player in sugar, bio-pesticides and nutraceuticals.

The extended Murugappa clan works out from a maze of interconnected but thoroughly modern offices in Dare House. In spite of its headquarters’ name, the 117-year-old Murugappa Group is known for its caution, collective decisionmaking and conservativeness. Sometime last year, however, celebrations broke out at Dare House. For the first time, group company Cholamandalam Investment and Finance Company (CIFC), a non-banking financial company (NBFC) into vehicle and home equity financing, had overtaken cross-town rival Sundaram Finance in market capitalisation on the bourses. There was a history to why this achievement was being celebrated. When Arunachalam Vellayan, current Executive Chairman of Murugappa Group, took over in 2009 from his uncle M. A. Alagappan, CIFC was just in the process of ending a disastrous joint venture (JV) with DBS of Singapore. The JV had made ill-advised moves in consumer and personal finance. Uncharacteristically, it had imprudently advanced consumer and personal finance loans in the go-go years between 2005 and 2009, which had turned bad; the losses threatened to bring down the group’s reputation, if not the group itself.