Wired Into The Future

BY CONSTANTLY MEETING TARGETS, LAKSH VAAMAN SEHGAL HAS PROVED HIS METTLE. NOW, AS HEAD OF MOTHERSON INNOVATIONS, HE IS USING THE LEARNINGS FROM HIS BILLIONAIRE FATHER TO TAKE THE GROUP FORWARD

- Salil Panchal

If your father counts among India’s richest men and is an entrepreneur who has built India’s largest auto component maker, it is not easy to step out of his shadow. But Laksh Vaaman Sehgal, 35, son of Vivek Chaand Sehgal, has done that and more. Right from his first venture as a leader, when he turned around an ailing UK-based company.

Based mostly in London, Laksh —who is a director on the board of the family firm Motherson Sumi Systems Ltd (MSSL)—oversees the business of group subsidiary Samvardhana Motherson Automotive Systems Group. He also spearheads research and development initiatives at Motherson Innovations, a company involved in innovative and technological solutions for the entire group.

But to understand Laksh—and indeed the mind of his billionaire father—one must turn back to 2009 when Laksh had joined the family business on his return to India after completing his master’s in finance from Columbia University. He had earlier, in 2003, trained at MSSL’s partner firm Woco Group, which makes rubber components, at Bad Soden in Germany, and then in 2004, in Thailand on the shop floor.

The company had just acquired ailing UK-based firm Visiocorp, which made rear-view mirrors for cars, in March 2009, and the top brass of Samvardhana Motherson Group (SMG) had gathered in June at the Noida headquarters for a strategy review meeting to discuss how to revive the fortunes of the firm, now renamed Samvardhana Motherson Reflectec (SMR). SMR’s business forms part of SMG.

The UK-based company’s losses were so sharp that they had pushed the flagship MSSL into a loss for the June-end quarter. SMR had posted a loss of ₹22.3 crore in the quarter ended June 2009, which plunged MSSL into a loss of ₹12.88 crore (before considering minority interests) in that period. Even in the subsequent quarter, SMR reported a standalone loss of ₹24.3 crore.