As a US$ 2.3 billion company, Welspun Group is one of India’s fastest growing conglomerates, registered at a CAGR of 30% over the last decade. Welspun is a fully integrated player within the Pipes, Plates & Coils and Home Textiles sector, while it also has a presence in the other business verticals such as Steel, Infrastructure and Energy.
As a globally recognized leader in the fields of Line Pipes and Home Textiles, Welspun Group has captured a strong foothold in more than 50 Countries, it employs over 24,000 people and has as many as 100,000+ shareholders.
Welspun’s vision is: “Delight our customers through innovation and technology, achieve inclusive and sustainable growth to remain eminent in all our businesses”.
In the Line Pipe sector, Welspun has to its credit some of the most prestigious projects including the world’s deepest pipeline project in the Gulf of Mexico, U.S.A; heaviest pipeline project in the Persian Gulf; highest LNG pipeline project in Peru and longest pipeline project from Canada to the US.
While in the Home Textiles sector, Welspun is the largest integrated towel manufacturer in Asia, a leading supplier to 14 of the top 30 US retailers, and a global supplier offering the entire range of products within the segment.
Welspun is proactively involved in a highly developed CSR programme which focuses on the three ‘E’s – Education, Empowerment & Health and Environment. With an aim to give back to the society, the company has driven an entire campaign to empower the underprivileged and establishing a sustainable business model that takes care of the environment. The social activities aren’t just limited to high profile projects, in fact every Welspunite is encouraged to contribute to the community in any small way they can.
Welspun CEO Dipali Goenka says “We pride ourselves being customer-centric and leaders in the industries we operate in! We love what we do and are continuously looking for those who believe in turning passion into action. As a three decade young conglomerate, we touch lives in over 50 countries. If you are searching for an exciting career, we promise a challenging and fulfilling environment. Our employees are our biggest asset. With a strong focus on inclusive growth, our endeavour is to ensure a great unifying culture.”
She adds “As we prepare to address new markets, customers and growth strategies for the future we have embarked on a new journey, called Welspun 2.O. ‘Leading Tomorrow Together’ is our new philosophy, our mantra for Welspun 2.O. It is our shared vision and the single-minded and unifying goal of all Welspunites.”
Bolt Threads is a biotech company based in Emeryville, California, that produces sustainable materials to supply the apparel industry.
Among these materials are a synthetic spider silk called Microsilk, developed without the help of spiders, and a newly-announced synthetic leather material called Mylo derived from the root structure of mushrooms. The production of Bolt Threads’ synthetic spider silk material has nothing to do with actual spiders.
One of China’s biggest smartphone makers has never sold a handset in the country. Yet thousands of miles away, it dominates markets across Africa. Unknown in the West, Transsion has left global players like Samsung and Apple trailing in its wake in a continent that’s home to more than a billion people.
In cities like Lagos, Nairobi and Addis Ababa, busy streets are awash with the bright blue shopfronts of Transsion’s flagship brand, Tecno. In China, the company doesn’t have a single store, and its towering headquarters in the southern megacity of Shenzhen goes largely unnoticed among skyscrapers bearing the names of more famous Chinese tech firms.
The company took a different path to success from other top Chinese smartphone makers such as Huawei and Xiaomi, which started out in China before eventually expanding overseas. Transsion built its business in Africa. And it has no plans to come home.
The selfie test
In Edna Mall on the bustling Bole Road in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, Mesert Baru poses for her Tecno Camon i. “This phone is seriously nice for selfies,” says the 35-year-old shop assistant, admiring the picture she just took.
Mesert’s satisfaction is no accident. Tecno cameras have been optimized for African complexions, explains Arif Chowdhury, vice president of Transsion. “Our cameras adjust more light for darker skin, so the photograph is more beautiful,” he says. “That’s one of the reasons we’ve become successful.”
Transsion founder George Zhu had spent nearly a decade traveling Africa as head of sales for another mobile phone company when he realized that selling Africans handsets made for developed markets was the wrong approach.
His timing could hardly have been better. By the mid-2000s, the Chinese government, under its “Going Out” strategy, was encouraging entrepreneurs to look abroad and forge stronger ties with African nations in particular. Cell phones were spreading rapidly in China, but in Africa — which has a roughly similar population — they were still a very rare luxury.
Africa, in other words, could be the new China.
Consumer driven
In 2006, Zhu launched Tecno in Nigeria, targeting Africa’s most populous nation first. From the start, the company’s motto was “think global, act local,” which meant making phones that met Africans’ specific needs.
“When we started doing business in Africa, we noticed people had multiple SIM cards in their wallet,” Chowdhury says. They would awkwardly swap the cards throughout the day to avoid the steep charges operators would levy for calling different networks, says Nabila Popal, who tracks the use of devices in Africa for research firm IDC. “They can’t afford two phones,” says Chowdhury, “so we brought a solution to them.” Zhu made all Tecno handsets dual SIM.
More innovations followed. Transsion opened research and development centers in China, Nigeria and Kenya to work out how to better appeal to African users. Local languages such as Amharic, Hausa and Swahili were added to keyboards and phones were given a longer battery life.
Extra power was important. In Nigeria, South Africa and Ethiopia, for example, the government frequently shuts off electricity to conserve power, leaving people unable to charge their phones for hours. In less developed markets, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chowdhury says, consumers might have to walk 30 kilometers to charge their phone at the local market — and have to pay to do so. “For those kind of consumers, longer battery life is a blessing,” he adds.
Sewedo Nupowaku, the Lagos-based CEO of entertainment company Revolution Media, says he switched from a Samsung S3 to a Tecno L8 for this reason. “I can spend 24 hours constantly talking, browsing on this phone, no problem. With a Samsung, no way.”
But perhaps Transsion’s smartest move was its pricing. It has three main brands: Tecno, Infinix and Itel. Most of their feature and smartphones sell for between $15 and $200.
Mesert says she bought her Tecno smartphone for 2,000 birr ($72). At a shop near her workplace, an iPhone 7 costs the equivalent of $906, and a Samsung Galaxy J7 around $360. Average monthly wages in Ethiopia range from 1,500 birr ($54) to 3,000 ($108) birr, and most vendors across Africa don’t allow customers to pay in installments.
“About 95% of Transsion smartphones cost under $200,” says Mo Jia, an analyst at technology research firm Canalys. “They are the king of the budget smartphone.”
African Chinese
Less than a decade ago, Chinese phones were barely on the radar in Africa. In 2010, Nokia and Samsung dominated sales across the continent. By the first half of this year, Nokia’s share of the market had collapsed and Samsung was selling only one in 10 phones. Transsion had come from nowhere to take more than 50% of the market, according to Canalys. For smartphones alone, it accounts for nearly a third of all sales in Africa, according to IDC.
Apple has been complacent about African markets, Jia says, because it deemed the slim profit margins on low-cost phones not worth fighting for. Transsion, on the other hand, is happy to work with tight margins, he adds. Apple didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Transsion’s rise reflects the wider role Chinese firms now play in providing the technology people across Africa use to communicate, including the high-speed internet networks on which smartphones rely. The Shenzhen-based company is now looking to IPO, and currently valued at $4billion.
When Canadian science graduate Christopher Charles visited Cambodia six years ago he discovered that anaemia was a huge public health problem.
In the villages of Kandal province, instead of bright, bouncing children, Dr Charles found many were small and weak with slow mental development. Women were suffering from tiredness and headaches, and were unable to work. Pregnant women faced serious health complications before and after childbirth, such as haemorrhaging. Ever since, Dr Charles has been obsessed with iron.
Anaemia is the most common nutritional problem in the world, mainly affecting women of child-bearing age, teenagers and young children. In developing countries, such as Cambodia, the condition is particularly widespread with almost 50% of women and children suffering from the condition, which is mainly caused by iron deficiency.
The standard solution – iron supplements or tablets to increase iron intake – isn’t working. The tablets are neither affordable nor widely available, and because of the side-effects people don’t like taking them.
Lump of iron
Dr Charles had a novel idea. Inspired by previous research which showed that cooking in cast iron pots increased the iron content of food, he decided to put a lump of iron into the cooking pot, made from melted-down metal.
His invention, shaped like a fish, which is a symbol of luck in Cambodian culture, was designed to release iron at the right concentration to provide the nutrients that so many women and children in the country were lacking. The recipe is simple, Dr Charles says. “Boil up water or soup with the iron fish for at least 10 minutes. “That enhances the iron which leaches from it. “You can then take it out. Now add a little lemon juice which is important for the absorption of the iron.”
If the iron fish is used every day in the correct way, Dr Charles says it should provide 75% of an adult’s daily recommended intake of iron – and even more of a child’s. Trials on several hundred villagers in one province in Cambodia showed that nearly half of those who took part were no longer anaemic after 12 months. In a previous trial, published in the European Journal of Public Health, participants started using water from wells after a few months, because of drought, which was contaminated by arsenic. Arsenic blocks the uptake of iron so it looked like the fish had stopped working.
‘Better than tablets’
Prof Imelda Bates, head of the international public health department at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, says the iron fish is a welcome development. “These sort of approaches are so much better than iron tablets, which are really horrible. “If it’s something that is culturally acceptable and not too costly, then any improvement to anaemia levels would be of great benefit.”
Around 2,500 families in Cambodia are now using the iron fish and the Lucky Iron Fish company, set up by Gavin Armstrong, has distributed nearly 9,000 fish to hospitals and non-governmental organisations in the country. What pleases Dr Charles most is the fact that villagers appear to have accepted the smiling iron fish, which is 3in (7.6 cm) long and weighs about 200g (7.1 oz).
One woman and her daughter, who are part of a current trial in Preah Vihear Province, said they would use it during cooking. “I’m happy, the blood test results show that I have the iron deficiency problem, so I hope will be cured and will be healthy soon. “I think all the people in Sekeroung village will like the fish, because fish is our everyday food.”
Scale of anaemia
The World Health Organization estimates that two billion people – over 30% of the world’s population – are anaemic, mostly due to iron deficiency. It says stopping iron deficiency is a priority – for individuals and countries. “The benefits are substantial. Timely treatment can restore personal health and raise national productivity levels by as much as 20%,” it has said. And it emphasises that it is the poorest and most vulnerable who stand to gain the most from its reduction.
Rice diet
In those with iron-deficiency anaemia, the cause is often poor diet. And that’s the case in Cambodia, Dr Charles says. “They have a really poor diet – a big plate of white rice and maybe a small cut of fish. “That’s their two meals a day. And it’s just not meeting their nutritional requirements.” What’s missing from their diet are iron-rich foods, particularly red meat. Green leafy vegetables, such as spinach, are not as rich in iron and mustn’t be overcooked if they are to offer any benefit at all.
The Lucky Iron Fish project has a plan to get fish to every part of the world that needs them, including countries like Canada, the US and Europe. So should everyone be putting recycled metal car parts in their soup? According to the experts, there is no reason not to – although levels of anaemia are far lower in developed countries, and there is easier access to iron-rich foods which can make all the difference to pregnant women and vegans, for example.
We could all eat iron filings instead, of course, but they wouldn’t taste half as nice.
After Serafina Palandech and her wife, Chef Jen Johnson, exited the chicken company they built from the ground up, she found herself questioning what would come next. Little did she know that what was next was a hemp-infused snacks company. Now, Palandech is the CEO of A Boring Life (a play on her and Johnson’s new home base: Boring, Oregon), which launched earlier this year. Read on to find out how Palandech got to where she is now, her tips on working with a romantic partner, and what’s next for A Boring Life.
Here’s an extract from an interview she did recently for The Every Girl:
Why did you start “A Boring Life”?
My career has taken some wildly divergent turns. When I got out of college — I went to UC Santa Cruz — I moved up to San Francisco, and started working for a fundraising event called AIDS Walk San Francisco. I started as, like, Receptionist Number 3, and back then, AIDS was very, very much a crisis and millions of people were dying annually. There really was no hope in a fight, but there was a lot of community organizing around HIV and AIDS and folks were really trying to continue coming together to support people that were living with HIV and with AIDS in order to build some support that wasn’t being offered by the government or by social institutions.
I took a job there as a receptionist and I ended up spending 15 years in that line of work. I moved my way up from Receptionist Number 3 to the event director within a very short amount of time. I held a variety of different positions there and it evolved into doing mass-participatory fundraising events across the United States for a variety of different non-profit organizations. So, I think what I learned there was the ability that a small group of like-minded people can change the world with very little resources. It really suited my skill set and was a great opportunity and I learned a ton — I did that for 15 years. At the end of it I started my own events business where I would put on fundraising events for different non-profits.
After 15 years of essentially fundraising for nonprofits and community organizing, I retired to have a baby. My wife and I got married, and I got pregnant and I decided to stay home with her and I realized within months that that was not a possibility for me. I really enjoy working and I really needed to pursue a career.
Now, my wife, Jen Johnson, is incredible. She has this amazing culinary background — right out of culinary school she went over and cooked at Chez Panisse with Alice Waters and cooked there for 10 years. Then, she got a private cheffing position with the Getty family and cooked for them for 16 years. She’s just this incredible, incredible chef and she’s cooked for everyone you could ever imagine. After we had our daughter, we decided to start our own business featuring one of Jen’s products. She would make chicken fingers — like a healthy, organic version of a chicken nugget — for the kids. So we decided to take that to market. The idea was to innovate a really kind of disgusting category, right?
A chicken nugget is not known for its high quality, but it’s a mass-consumed product, and utilizes all organic ingredients as well as very high animal welfare standards for the animals that we sourced from. We took that to market and it grew really quickly. We took it into grocery stores across the country, and I sold chicken nuggets on QVC, and we got all these awards for innovating. It was a crazy ride, and this year we sold it to a competitor.
As we were exiting Hip Chick Farms, we moved up to be closer to my family. We moved up to Oregon and we bought a farm in a town called Boring, Oregon — it’s beautiful and it’s very dull. It was great because we wanted to be with family, and we also needed a little break from the kind of craziness of starting and building a food company. It’s a lavender farm and is very beautiful.
Jen and I had both started taking CBD and we wanted to take it and incorporate it into a food product for ease of incorporation into our daily lives, so we developed the next venture, called A Boring Life. It’s a line of high-protein snacks that are infused with hemp extract. I just really believe in hemp as the miracle cure for all of us, and for our environment. Okay, so it’s not the cure, but I feel like it could be part of our solution.
So that’s where we’re at today. Now I’m running a hemp company, and we just started that this year. I never would have thought. Never. I actually was quite anti-cannabis, to be honest with you, but I’ve completely changed my perspective. Like, I was doing chicken, and now our products are all vegetarian. We’ve completely flipped and it’s awesome.
Why a CBD-infused snack?
Our first product line is almonds and walnuts — I love almonds and walnuts, and I eat them all the time as a snack. The properties of almonds and walnuts work really well with CBD. So the high-protein and the omega-3s help your body to absorb it and to incorporate it into your own cannabinoid system — and they’re natural antidepressants. Hemp extract [may] help with anxiety, depression, and pain relief. In my experience, it helps with anxiety. I wanted to get it out in a format that was really convenient and easy to use for people like me, and also didn’t have the social stigma of pulling out a vape or a bottle of oil, so it’s just easy to incorporate into their daily life.
Each single serving has 25mg of the full-spectrum hemp extract, and for me that’s a really good starting place. I wouldn’t say our products are prescriptive, they’re just overall feel-good foods. I take like 40-50mg a day, but my wife takes like four times that, so it seems to vary greatly by person.
Everybody is so different, but there are also a lot of players in the field and it isn’t regulated yet, so it’s difficult to know. There are certain things to look for and to think about how the product is being grown and how it’s being processed.
How will you grow?
We launched the nut products into grocery stores about two months ago — we’re in about 60 stores right now. It’s doing well at retail. I just got back from the Fancy Foods Show in New York and we talked to around 67 leads — so we got a really good response. There was just a study that came out about how snacks and hemp is going to be the next big thing, but I think hemp is really the next big thing, more than CBD. So I think we’re going to have a huge growth. I think we’re positioned at the right time and the right place with the right team. I think we’re going to have a huge growth opportunity and then eventually we’ll be able to develop additional products across a product portfolio to be more of a lifestyle brand.
Automated rickshaws are a popular mode of transport in India, particularly in smaller cities. However, the sector is still chaotic, and many sit idle, while commuters search for an auto rickshaw. To fill this gap Samar Singla and Chinmay Agarwal founded Jugnoo in 2014. It is India’s largest technology driven on-demand auto rickshaw aggregator, which connects riders with safe, reliable, convenient auto rickshaw just in few clicks.
There are around 50,000 auto rickshaws in the tier 1 cities of India. Again in tier 2 cities, there are approx 15000-30000 auto rickshaws. The concept of auto aggregator is quite new in India. However many newbies, as well as leaders like Uber and Ola, have entered the autoaggregation sector.
Jugnoo was founded by Samar Singla and Chinmay Agarwal in 2014. Samar also founded Click Labs. He also has been a researcher at the University of Maryland and IBM. He has also contributed as a scientist at CERN, Geneva. His mission is to change billions of lives with the help of technology. Samar is now the CEO of the company.
Chinmay pursued masters in robotics from the University of Genoa and been a scientist at Smart Cane. He co-founded Click Labs with Samar. Chimay also has patent of Methods and applications for altitude measurement and fusion of user context detection with elevation motion for personal navigation systems. Chinmay is now the COO of the company.
In the beginning, Jugnoo’s founders, Samar and Chinmay were unaware of the major influence they were about to make on the daily lives of the common commuters and the Auto drivers. Initiated with a casual attitude, soon they realized the situation was way more challenging than anticipated. Jugnoo is Samar’s third venture, after Prodigy Foods, which he exited in two years, and started SaaS technology solution provider Click Labs.
The company has 400+ employees currently. Samar stresses on the need to keep one’s employees motivated. Talk to them, be very transparent and align with them for the long term.
Starting Up
Samar observed that the major issues in the auto transport network were the obstinately uncooperative attitude of the auto drivers, unavailability and unreasonable charges. The idea was to tap the potential public transport medium in tier 2 and tier 3 cities, i.e., the auto rickshaw, so public can hail it by using the mobile app and the auto drivers can save on the waiting time; a concept similar to the taxi services like Ola. Jugnoo App was introduced on all the major platforms in smartphones such as ios, Android and Windows. Users can also book Jugnoo rides using Jugnoo’s Facebook bot.
Jugnoo means firefly. According to Samar, the word Jugnoo is related to nostalgia and happy memories. When people see an auto with a Jugnoo sticker, it becomes easier for them to remember Jugnoo company. The name, thus, has a recall value.
Jugnoo initially started as an on-demand autorickshaw service. But as it was smooth on the rails, the founders took a leap and launched various new services such:
- Dodo deliveries – It enables vendors to deliver goods to their customers.
- Jugnoo Bot – which allows the customers to hail the rickshaw from any platform.
- Flight map – planned out the route and resources in advance and save fuel and time.
- Multilingual interface for drivers – with over eight languages other than English.
- Fatafat – hyperlocal deliveries like food, grocery, veggies. Fatafat was shut down in October 2015. The service was launched again in Chandigarh in May 2016, after acquiring SabKuch Fresh.
- Menus – The company had earlier launched Jugnoo meals. However, it was closed down in October 2015, and in 2017 it was re-launched as Menus. Jugnoo Menus has brought on board popular restaurants and outlets like Burger King, Pizza Hut, Subway, Baskin Robins, Super Donut, Burger point, Rolla costa, Copper Chimney, Marky Momos and Dhaba.com
- AskLocal – The AskLocal feature of the Jugnoo app will not only provide local information but is also a platform where the users can ask questions, give recommendations and share content. It is a geolocation-based platform and is operational across all locations covered by Jugnoo.
Business Model
Pricing at Jugnoo differs on a city to city basis. The strategy is to be the most affordable A-2-B transport option for the app users in that city. Some cities have a base fare + per km + per minute charge, some cities operate on meter fare. You can check the rates in different cities by downloading the app and searching for the cities. The fare is displayed in the bottom bar.
Jugnoo charges a commission back from the drivers. The commission rate is 10% of the ticket size in most cities. they run a number of incentive schemes for the drivers, this again is based on the stage of maturity in a city and the engagement level of the drivers. It is trying to build efficiency in the market where the final income of driver through Jugnoo should increase to significantly more than what they were earning on the road and the customer get a predictable and cost-effective medium of transport. For food delivery, the company charges merchants a commission and pays the auto drivers for delivery.
In the initial days, Samar and Chinmay themselves met the auto drivers and explained the concept of the company. Convincing them to integrate technology in their routine work was quite a challenging task. Besides for making the Jugnoo app familiar to the target customer, the app was launched at PECFEST of PEC University of Technology, Chandigarh. Also, free rides were provided to people in Chandigarh.
Marketing Strategy of Jugnoo is simple; they make their customers and drivers their promoters. They have tapped the dual capacity of home delivery and on-demand availability of public transport. They are growing exponentially in major metros by forging a strategic alliance with partners that adds to its potential customer base. Jugnoo also made a media presence by making Saumya Tondon, a well-known TV and films actress its face. According to Samar, Jugnoo has benefited a lot from word of mouth publicity. Jugnoo runs user referral programs and social media campaigns to attract new customers. Jugnoo stayed in buzz with news like enrolling the first female auto driver, crossing 10k rides per day in Delhi NCR, backing series B funding even after Shutdown of Fatafat and Jugnoo Meals.
Challenges
In Samar’s words, the initial challenges, which could be attributed to the demography of the tier 2 locations, were the reluctance of the drivers to use the technology and to break mental barriers of the customers and introduce new ideas.
The two other major hiccups in the otherwise seamless journey were Jugnoo Fatatfat, which did home delivery of custom orders from stores within the city to customers. It was launched in March 2015 with an idea of in cashing the auto network, however, it was shut down after being operational for eight months. Also Jugnoo had to close down Jugnoo Meal in October 2015.
However the company later re-launched Fatafat and launched Jugnoo menus.
Team Jugnoo stands by the bumpy rides and says that they have chosen to be careful rather than keep investing in something which out returns us a loss. All this while they used less than half of their reservoirs and concentrated on growing as a lean and productive unit.
Jugnoo has a great market presence in the arena of Auto rickshaw aggregators competes with startups like mGaadi, TeleRichshaw and AUTOnCaB’s. However, the concept of Jugnoo is unique as it focuses only on auto rickshaw space.
Growth
For expansion and enhance customer base jugnoo tied up with a travel search engine called Ixigo, a personal assistant application by the name of Helpchat( Tapzo), a public transportation information mobile app Zophop, an app with meta-search platforms to compare modes of transport on the basis of price called Oye Taxi and Scoot. The payment gateways like Paytm and Mobikwik have digitized payments for Jugnoo. Punjab National Bank and Piaggio provided the drivers with easy funding options. Collaborating with connoisseurs from the industry like Anand Prakash also made Jugnoo shine brighter.
In the span of 3 years Jugnoo acquired Sabkuch Fresh, a logistics services firms which delivered Groceries and hence expanded its services to grocery & fresh meals, food delivery from a choice of restaurants, payments and deliveries. It also acquired Yelo in September 2015. In July 2016, the company acquired taxi aggregator BookMyCab, which operates in Mumbai, Kolkata and Hyderabad and is licensed to operate in Delhi.
Put together, some of the major achievements of Jugnoo are
- Jugnoo established itself as the leading auto-rickshaw aggregator company of India, with around 40,000 people transacting per day.
- The company has developed customer-centric services such as B2B deliveries, Food grocery and meals delivery using auto- rickshaw, which is a unique business idea.
- Jugnoo has come up with latest technologies like Jugnoo Bot which allows the customer to hail rickshaw from any platform, Flight map which aids the drivers in planning the routes to save time and fuel, a multi-lingual interface for drivers and AskLocal a hyperlocal geo-location-based feature that helps users to stay connected and share content.
- Jugnoo is constantly exploring new avenues. It has launched its services in diverge fields like 3D printing with Printo, end to end field force management solution Tookan, real time customer support app – Fugu, work flow automation tool – Bumbl and geo analytics technology – Data Loops
- The company has been able to attract funding from biggies like Paytm and Snow Leopard Technology Ventures. Jugnoo raised a whopping $16 million in external funding
- Jugnoo has more than 12000 autos registered with it.
- Jugnoo is operating across 45+ cities
- It has a registered user base of 8 million.
- In April 2018, the company started operations in Singapore, it had to close down in August 2018, owing to challenges it faced while recruiting drivers in Singapore. However Jugnoo tied up with Singapore’s local aggregator app Kardi. Jugnoo is providing technical expertise and engineering support to Kardi.
- Jugnoo also affirms to have international presence in Trinidad and Tobago, Sri Lanka, Bermuda, Panama, Mombasa, Oman, Congo, Nigeria, Indonesia, England, UAE and the US.
The groundwork for the company began in 2007 as a garage-housed hobby of founder, Mate Rimac. He converted his BMW E30 to incorporate an electric powertrain and subsequently gained attention from the press and investors.
CEO Mate Rimac started to convert this car when he was only 19 years old: “I owned an old BMW E30 (MY 1984) which I used for drift and circuit races. At one of these races, the gas engine blew up. Then I decided to try building an EV. After one year or so the car was able to drive but I was not satisfied with the result. It was heavy, not very powerful and the range was very limited. I started to gather a team of experts to develop our own components since I believed that the electric propulsion can give much more compared to what was available on the market. At that time, I already had a very clear vision of my ultimate goal. Today, hard work is making my dream come true.”
Strongly believing that electric propulsion systems can be used to power the new generation of sports cars and make them better, faster and more exciting, he has started the project with a handful of people as his team. The company’s flagship, the Concept_One, was entirely designed, developed and manufactured in-house. In 2018 Rimac introduced the next generation hypercar, the C_Two, a car alive with technology.
Today, the company numbers over 450 people and has grown into a leader within a highly competitive industry with the ambition to become a full electrification partner for many OEMs. The company is highly vertically integrated, with a team that can tackle incredible technical challenges and deliver high-quality solutions in a short time-frame. Rimac Automobili has challenged the status-quo with the vision to revolutionise and reinvent the sports car with its unique technology thus successfully tackling the electrification challenge set upon the automotive industry. Most of all, we are excited to offer customers the opportunity to use our technology and know-how to create new and exciting products.
Options magazine takes up the story:
The phrase “youth is wasted on the young” — often attributed to Irish playwright and political activist George Bernard Shaw — is applied derisively to young people with an apparent lack of perception for temporal nonlinearity. To challenge and indeed counter that generalisation, I have just two words: Mate Rimac. Having founded the world’s first electrical supercar company, Rimac Automobili, three years ago at the age of 27, Mate was selected as Croatian Entrepreneur of the Year in 2017 by Ernst and Young Croatia. Although he didn’t win the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year prize last June in Monaco, he did turn heads for achieving so much, so early on in life.
Based in the Austro-Hungarian city of Zagreb, Rimac’s electric cars are not only efficient and environmentally friendly, but also luxuriously well-appointed, beautifully designed and thoroughly performance-driven. Mate’s goal is to build an automotive company in his native Croatia — which has never had a car industry, and very few technology-based ones — that produces cars to outperform the powerful petrol-guzzlers from the likes of Bugatti, McLaren and Lamborghini.
Tall and bearded with an easy smile, Mate’s journey with Rimac actually began as a child — he loved anything to do with cars, and spending part of childhood in Germany only fuelled that passion. “I have loved cars since before I could walk and talk. It’s really funny, actually, because no one in my family is involved in cars and I was born in a part of Bosnia that didn’t have that many cars, or even roads — it was mostly agricultural. Because of the Yugoslav wars, we moved to Germany, and my parents told me I was so crazy happy because of all the cars on the road,” Mate laughs.
When the family moved back to Croatia, he finished his education in a technical school, where students are required to build something as their graduation project. His was a glove that did away with the need for a mouse and a keyboard — an idea that was especially useful at a time when touch screens were not yet prevalent. This ingenious innovation won several local and international awards, and Mate acquired his first patents before he was 18. While no one owns an iGlove today, it was the earliest indication of Mate’s eye for innovation, creativity and technical flair.
Mate bought a car when he turned 18 — a 1984 BMW 3 Series — to indulge his love for automobiles. His boxy, sturdy E30 was barely two weeks old when its engine blew during a race, but rather than a like-for-like replacement, he considered something totally different. “I was always thinking about an electric car, and I grew up reading about Nikola Tesla — who was born in Croatia — and I wondered why electric motors in sportscars hadn’t already been done. It’s hard to imagine now, but electric cars then were considered not very exciting. But I wanted to change that — I wanted to make not just an electric car, but one that would kick petrol powered cars’ asses,” he shared.
Elon Musk’s Tesla cars were launched at about the same time in Palo Alto, California, but it was a distant reality from the gritty races in Croatia where Mate was bravely showcasing his electric car in. Indeed, the Croatian racing community weren’t at all impressed and endlessly jeered Mate. “They used to tell me I was racing a washing machine,” he says, grinning good-naturedly. “I had many issues with my car, but after every race, I fixed each thing that went wrong so after a while, I got faster and faster and that’s when people realised I was on to something — they stopped laughing at me, and would come to the races to watch me instead.”
Mate’s success is even more notable considering he was racing against powerful petrol-powered cars. “I won my first race in 2010 — which, as far as I’m aware, is the first time an electric-powered car has beaten a gas-powered one — and in 2011, that old BMW broke several Guinness and FIA records for the fastest accelerating car,” he adds proudly.
Translating his technical skills into a successful business was the hardest part of Mate’s journey. “Croatia never had a car industry, so this was like the perfect storm — new technology in an industry that was notoriously hard to enter, and I had no money. The odds of becoming what we are today were pretty much zero,” he recalls. “I needed to do something to raise funds, so my idea was to work for the industry first instead of in it.”
His solution was to manufacture components for the electric car industry so Rimac would become self-sufficient. While his ideas for an electric supercar remained on the back-burner, Mate and his core team did everything in their power — skipping pay cheques, weekends and holidays — to keep the company in business so their collective dream could one day come true. “For the first five years, I teetered on the brink of bankruptcy pretty much all the time — it was normal for us. But it was still better than the other EV companies that actually went into receivership,” he recalls. Eventually, Rimac managed to secure a total of €60 million in funding, which isn’t all that much bearing in mind the costs involved in electric supercars.
As a result, the company now has two profitable businesses — one that showcases what electric supercars can do, and one that provides end-to-end support for other carmakers eager to get into the electric mobility game. Rimac’s first electric supercar, the Concept One, was launched in 2014 with some truly impressive statistics underpinning its performance — 0 to 100kph in 2.5 seconds, a top speed of 355kph and torque of 1,600Nm. Because Mate and his team was approaching the electric supercar idea from scratch, the Concept One featured several ground-breaking technologies — a torque vectoring system for superior handling, for example, and a user interface that was unlike anything the automotive world had ever seen. Incidentally, the Concept One was used as the official zero-emission race director’s car during the first season of Formula E championship that year.
Meanwhile, the C_Two was launched this year, capable of hitting 0-100 kph in 1.85 seconds and is also semi-autonomous. Rimac only plans to make 150 of these cars, all of which were sold out three weeks after the launch. The first deliveries are expected to take place in 2020.
In the case of both cars, stunningly luxurious interiors perfectly match stylised exteriors that are 100% purpose-designed for performance — aerodynamics, safety and technical requirements dictate every aspect of the design. Completely bespoke, high levels of innovation and previously unseen technology — Rimac sounds a lot like a luxury company, although Mate is opposed to the idea that electric mobility is only for the elite. “We are not a snobby company making cars for only the billionaires of the world, but we have to start here,” he states. “Once the electric mobility model is more popular, we then have the manufacturing capabilities to make it more accessible.
“I’ve had the same opinion for the last five years — it is inevitable that cars one day will be autonomous and fully electric. No one will own cars anymore, nor will they care what is under the bonnet — cars will be a service. Things are going to change rapidly in the next two decades and it will change our lives, like how mobile phones did. Yes, of course, there will still be fans of motor racing and gas-powered vehicles, but electric cars will simply make more sense in the long term because of what cars are becoming,” he adds.
Mate makes his entrepreneurial journey seem easy — a youthful, unlined face belies the sleepless nights he once spent wondering how he was going to pay salaries and bills. Now, all I can see is an intelligent, insightful and extremely hard-working young man who understands, instinctively, that the only way forward is to embrace the future, and that resistance is futile. “This kind of life means sacrificing a lot, and I think my parents would prefer it if I sold the company and lived a normal life with a family. But this is what I’ve chosen for myself,” Mate says, rubbing his chin. “And I don’t think I’d want to do anything else.”
Rhythmix
What’s the greatest asset at any company? The people. Every solution we create starts with them. They are the contributors to success. The executors of the strategy. The sum of any company. When the right people do the right thing in the right structure, your company runs at its best. That’s why Haufe’s entire portfolio works to empower your people, because they make powerful contributions your company relies on. People-first organisations ultimately strengthen and support the greater good because people run companies.
- Haufe Quadrant: This depicts the relationship between employee-type and organizational-design to reveal why you need integrated solutions to empower and align your people.
- 3 Dimensional: Rather than being fragmented by software and services that don’t sync up, Haufe’s unique three-dimensional approach combines organizational empowerment, people empowerment, and technology to ensure your whole company is aligned.
- Rhythmix: Integrating consulting, software, and services, Rhythmix offers a new solution that gets your business strategy moving by getting your entire organization aligned to it.
- Success Engineering: With periodic measurements that populate simple data visualizations, the Haufe Success Score ensures that your company’s orientation isn’t lost— both during and after Rhythmix implementation.
- WHYral transformation: Change is hard— especially for companies. Fortunately, WHYral Change offers a new approach: give the right message, to the right people, at the right time.
- Co-Creation: This is a success-oriented partnership that allows you to help create and gain first access to new solutions that expand Haufe’s employee-centric Operating System
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vmolk6sq79k
Business democracy
It all started when I felt that I was no longer the right person for the position of CEO. I saw our current CEO Marc Stoffel as my successor. But we both agreed: that’s not how our company works. We can’t simply put someone in the top job. So instead we allowed the employees to decide.
Back then we really couldn’t foresee how the company would develop with the introduction of elections. But now we are certain that we made the right move – and that goes for all employees, as our last strategy meeting showed. Together we decided that we wanted to continue working according to the democratic principle. Because thanks to our type of company management we have achieved key positive impacts that make our culture strong today:
Consequence 1: an elected leader has backing from the team
Through the election of a manager their visions and goals become those of the team, for with their votes the employees have made an active decision and therefore assume responsibility for successful execution.
Consequence 2: A non-election is an election too
An election remains an election even in instances where there is only one candidate for a position because I have the choice of not giving my vote to this candidate. The deselection of a candidate has even turned out to be the much more important tool. Because someone may do a good job of selling her- or himself but anyone who fails to do a good job in the long term can also be voted out again.
Consequence 3: Elections encourage dialogue
Every candidate must define their desired role in advance of the election and communicate this definition along with all associated targets, possible challenges and their own strengths and weaknesses to everyone. In addition they must be questioned by the employees so that mutual expectations can be weighed up in advance.
Consequence 4: communication is enhanced
Employees and managers listen to one another in completely different ways. Whilst employees know that they must ultimately reach the right decision, managers realize that their position lies in the hands of employees. As a result both parties are encouraged to communicate and to take these discussions seriously – not just immediately before elections.
Consequence 5: the election campaign strengthens management qualities
The elections are like a barometer of opinion. Some managers are indeed elected but fare worse than the previous year or than other candidates. This is a kind of warning and also acts as a spur to become better. In addition, the candidates can also always learn from one another.
Consequence 6: limited terms of office increase willingness to go the extra mile
On occasion someone is elected who isn’t up to the job or who quickly reaches the limits of their abilities. In classic companies the first effect is a dip in the mood and performance of the team. As a result some employees – typically the best ones – leave the company and finally the manager is replaced or departs. This causes considerable suffering on both sides. But if there is clear end in sight to this difficult phase it is easier to tolerate.
Consequence 7: deselections and resignations are normalized
A deselection or non-election is certainly not easy to accept because it initially feels like a loss of face. With time, however, it becomes a normal process and a voluntary resignation becomes a self-determined alternative. The important thing to bear in mind is that just because someone isn’t currently the right person for this precise position it doesn’t mean that this person essentially isn’t a good manager.
Consequence 8: a career becomes a spiral
Managers who have been deselected or resigned work in the team again. During this period they observe the new manager going about their work, make comparisons with their own management qualities and learn from their mistakes but above all observe the strengths of their successor – always balanced against their own experiences. The learning effect is huge and can be used to great advantage in a subsequent management role.
Consequence 9: employees demonstrate foresight and a sense of responsibility
Some managers don’t risk making unpopular decisions, fearing that they will not be reelected. However, this self-paralysis is unjustified because in our experience employees are definitely able to differentiate between tough decisions that have to be made and poor leadership skills.
The introduction of elections has strengthened our business culture and processes in unexpected ways and we are certain that they can be effective for other companies too.
Ping An strives to become a world leading technology-powered financial services group. It believes the way people receive financial services and healthcare in the future will be through intelligent ecosystems enabled by technology.
Ping An currently serves around 750 million online customers and 250 million retail customers in its five ecosystems in financial services, healthcare, auto services, real estate services, and smart city solutions.
Technology has enabled the company to bring changes to the landscape of retail finance and healthcare in China. Supported by the Group’s strong core financials, its continued investment in fintech and healthtech resulted in increasing revenue contributions from our tech units as well as several unicorns.
Ping An ranked 7th in Forbes’ 2019 Global 2000 with a market cap of US$220.2b, and 29th in the 2018 Fortune Global 500 with US$144,197m in revenue.
It is the world’s largest and most valuable insurer.
Safe and well
Ping An Insurance was founded by Mingzhe (Peter) Ma in Shenzhen in 1988. The Group was the first insurance company in China to adopt a shareholding structure. It has developed into a personal financial services group with three core businesses — insurance, banking and investment.
“Ping An” literally means “safe and well”.
Ping An endeavors to become a world-leading personal financial service provider upholding the belief of “technology-driven financial services for a better life”, focusing on “big financial assets” and “big health care”. It pursues growth in insurance, banking, asset management, and internet finance and provides customers with an excellent experience of “expertise makes life easier”. It has achieved sustainable growth in profits, and has provided long-term stable returns to shareholders.
For the core finance business, Ping An actively promotes its “One Customer, One Account, Multiple Products, and One-Stop Service” model; as for its Internet finance business, the Group weaves financial services into the very fabric of everyday life, spanning areas such as “health, food, housing, transportation and entertainment”, and gradually realizes synergies with its core finance business.
Ping An has over 1,600,000 employees and life insurance sales agents.
By following its philosophy of “Expertise Creates Value”, in addition to creating value for its shareholders, employees and customers, Ping An actively fulfills its commitment to the corporate social responsibility, pursuing win-win cooperation and progressing in step with all stakeholders. The Group continues to step up its efforts in major disaster relief, the environment, education, the Red Cross, communities and other worthy causes.
Ping An Insurance is now the world’s largest and most valuable insurer, worth US$217 billion (1.4 trillion yuan), as of January 2018. It is also one of the world’s biggest investment and asset management companies, with a total asset of US$958.5 billion (6.5 trillion yuan), as of 2017.
To be global leader in integrated personal finance
- Follow the concept of “Driven By Technology, Finance Can Serve Life Better” to concurrently promote the development of our core finance business and Internet finance business and become a global leader in integrated personal finance;
- Build an integrated financial services platform that is in line with the vision of “One Customer, One Account, Multiple Products and One-Stop Services” and promote cross-selling;
- Core finance business: promote “financial supermarket” and “customer migration” and propel the transformation and migration of “insurance customers to banking and investment customers” and “offline financial business customers to online service users”;
- Internet finance business: Based on the idea of “generate traffic; engage in lifestyles; and provide value-adds”, Ping An will build an Internet financial eco-system engaging in real life scenarios of health, food, housing, transportation and entertainment;
- Grow active customer base and high-quality assets to further enhance our unrivalled competitive advantages;
- Achieve sustainable growth in profits to provide shareholders with stable returns on a long-term basis.
Insurance Business
- Maintain the healthy and steady development of our property and casualty insurance and life insurance businesses while promoting their competitiveness and steady expansion in market share;
- Increase inputs in new business areas such as corporate annuity and health insurance.
Banking Business
- Accelerate the development by fully leveraging the Group’s existing advantages of integrated resources such as customer base, products, channels and platforms to fulfill our strategic target of becoming the “Best Bank”;
- Build Ping An Bank as a core integrated financial service platform to provide the Group’s customers with one-stop integrated financial services.
Investment Business
- Strive to develop the superior investment capacity and establish a leading investment platform;
- Strengthen the asset-liability-management capability while building a solid and comprehensive risk control system;
- Improve and enhance the third-party asset management business by providing a full array of high quality investment products with the aim of becoming a leader in Chinese wealth management market.
Internet Finance
- Engaging in daily living scenarios of health, food, housing, transportation and entertainment, the Company initiated the strategic framework of “One Gate, Two Focuses, Four Markets”, which is to connect a wide range of application scenarios through the “Magic Gate”, accelerate the mining, analysis and application of big data by focusing on asset management and health management, and establish an asset transaction market, a loyalty points transaction market, an automobile transaction market and a real estate financing market, to provide a wide range of users with one-stop financial services.
Ping An beyond finance
The company’s first steps beyond finance started in 2012 with the establishment of Lufax, a wealth management platform. Its aim was to provide an entry point into the fintech and healthtech sectors.
Technology and research and development have now become the Group’s cornerstones, powering its retail financial services operations to a client base of more than 250 million retailers and around 700 million online customers.
As CIO and later COO, JEssica Tan developed a vision of “technology plus finance” as key to Ping An’s ongoing success. Lufax, Chinese car sales website Autohome and Ping An Smart City – which incorporates cloud computing, blockchain and artificial intelligence into traditional infrastructure – are just some of the Group’s ventures that have benefited from her tech-heavy approach. “Whatever business we enter, we have to be in the top three” she says.
“We’ve always been very aggressive on the digitisation front,” Tan told the McKinsey Quarterly in late 2020. “We now spend more than US$1.7 billion of our revenue [on technology R&D] every year. Even though we never really know how technology will change, we think it’s important to have these capabilities.”
The new ventures proved successfully locally, and a global opportunity started to emerge. “We see an opportunity to expand our more tech-driven models overseas because they don’t require significant, in-depth local knowledge and the build-up of local resources, channels, customer preference,” she says.
In 2017 she started to focus on healthcare.
Ping An HealthKonnect (an online healthcare management platform that caters to 800 million people), Ping An Smart Healthcare (the medical arm of Smart City) and Ping An Good Doctor (a free end-to-end online consultation platform and the Group’s major foray into telehealth) were the fruit of these efforts.
She became Group Co-CEO and Executive Director in 2020, just as the Covid-19 pandemic infected the world. Good Doctor had become China’s largest online healthcare services platform. As the pandemic grew, visits to Good Doctor skyrocketed – by the peak of the pandemic, more than 1.11 billion virtual consultations had been undertaken.
Good Doctor generated more than $1 billion in revenue for Ping An that year. At the same time, HealthKonnect pioneered en-masse Covid testing in China, while Ping An Smart Healthcare’s digitisation scheme helped with social distancing.
A recent snapshot of performance shows how the key new businesses continue to grow:
Building on the success of the F1 team, McLaren formed a high-performance road car business, McLaren Automotive, which continues to set new benchmarks in performance and efficiency.
Launched in 2010, the company is now the largest part of the McLaren Group. Every vehicle is hand-assembled at the McLaren Production Centre (MPC) in Woking, Surrey, England. The company has three defined product families: Sports Series, Super Series and Ultimate Series which are retailed through over 80 retailers in 30 markets around the world.
From racing to road
In the late 1980s McLaren conceived the idea of building the world’s finest road car. On May 28th 1992, conception turned into reality as the McLaren F1 was unveiled to the public. Now, just over 20 years on, McLaren has revisited that original ambition.
The McLaren P1™ uses 50 years of racing experience and success, especially in the fields of aerodynamics and lightweight carbon fibre technology, to offer groundbreaking levels of performance combined with high levels of efficiency. The car was developed with one clear goal: to be the best driver’s car in the world on road and track.
The new twin-powered hypercar was born in the wind tunnel at the McLaren Technology Centre. It was honed with the bespoke fluid dynamics software suite usually applied to the creation of Formula One cars – and features an aero package and handling characteristics with strong F1 influences. Its beating heart is the innovative IPAS petrol-electric powertrain comprising a substantially revised 3.8-litre twin-turbo V8 petrol engine, which generates 737PS, coupled to a 179PS electric motor developed under the aegis of McLaren Applied Technologies. A lightweight battery pack harvests energy under throttle lift-off, and can also be charged either from a wall outlet or by the engine itself. Collectively, the new M838TQ powertrain is capable of delivering 916PS and a staggering 900Nm of torque, taking it from 0-100km/h in just 2.8 seconds. The car reaches 300 km/h in 16.5 seconds making it 5.5 seconds faster than the iconic McLaren F1.
However, the McLaren P1™ is far more than a list of impressive numbers. As important as absolute power is the electric motor’s ability to provide instant torque, filling torque gaps in the power curve to eradicate turbo-lag and create a sharper throttle response. Thanks to this superb driveability, the McLaren P1™ has joined the tiny elite of production cars to lap the fearsome Nürburgring Nordschleife in under seven minutes.
McLaren is a pioneer that continuously pushes the boundaries.
Having in 1981 introduced lightweight and strong carbon fibre chassis into Formula 1 with the McLaren MP4/1. Then in 1993 it designed and built the McLaren F1 road car – the company has not built a car without a carbon fibre chassis since. As part of the Ultimate Series, McLaren was the first to deliver a hybrid hypercar, the McLaren P1™.
Announced at Goodwood Festival of Speed in 2018, the company’s Track25 business plan will see it invest £1.2billion in research and development to deliver 18 new cars or derivatives by the end of 2025.
2017 saw the company launch further models including the second-generation Super Series, the 570S Spider and the McLaren Senna. In 2018, the company launched the 600LT.
To support the development, engineering and manufacture of its range of innovative sportscars and supercars, McLaren Automotive partners with world leading companies to provide specialist expertise and technology. These include AkzoNobel, Kenwood, Pirelli and Richard Mille.