India’s Gen Z billionaires are bored with business

By Andy Mukherjee

The family that ran India’s largest luggage maker for more than half a century is packing it in, with control of Mumbai-based VIP Industries Ltd. passing to private equity. “What do I do?” Dilip Piramal, the 75-year-old chairman, wondered aloud in a TV interview after announcing the sale. “The younger generation is not interested in management.”

Piramal isn’t the only aging businessperson to have run out of successors: “Today among the scions of some of the most affluent families of India, someone is an artist, someone wants to be a sportsman, someone wants to run a small restaurant. There’s nothing wrong in that. It’s the modern trend, people want to do their own things.”

Two hundred years ago, that “modern” trend among young people used to be enterprise. That’s when families like Piramal’s began to spread out of the Marwar region in land-locked northern India to take advantage of British-controlled trading opportunities in the port cities of Bombay and Calcutta — now Mumbai and Kolkata. Cotton, jute, and opium sold to China provided the seed capital to the Marwari business community for everything from textile mills to cement factories.

By the early 20th century, these emerging industrial empires were large enough to challenge the colonial masters and their commercial interests. The likes of Ghanshyam Das Birla openly supported Mahatma Gandhi’s campaign for independence, even as they outran rivals like Andrew Yule & Co. The Birla House in Delhi, a prominent hub for the freedom movement, was also where Gandhi was assassinated. As the sway of family firms continued after India’s 1947 independence, it was believed that newer generations would always be available to take over the reins.

Below the surface, however, the link between ownership and management has been weakening for some time.

Radhika Piramal

Piramal’s daughter, Radhika, a Harvard University MBA, was the chief executive officer for a few years before quitting in 2017 and relocating with her spouse to London. Her same-sex marriage is not legally recognized in India. The luggage maker was back to being in the care of professional managers, a double-edged sword considering that a rival firm set up by a former managing director is now three-fifths bigger than VIP by market value.

The heirs of prominent business families — millennial and Gen Z billionaires — are setting their own life goals. It’s the sensible thing to do. In a labor-surplus economy, access to capital through clan networks and strategic marital alliances was family-run firms’ core advantage. But via public markets and private equity, finance is now available to a much wider section of entrepreneurs. Risk-taking has been democratized.

That frees up younger members of business dynasties to try new things. Someone recently asked the singer-songwriter Ananya Birla on social media if she was from the family behind India’s largest-selling cement brand.

Ananya Birla

She is indeed the great-great-granddaughter of Ghanshyam Das Birla. But from financial inclusion among rural women to a recently launched beauty brand, the 31-year-old Oxford graduate has her own interests that are independent of the sprawling commodities behemoth led by her father.

Though they’re from Tamil Nadu in southern India, and not Marwar in Rajasthan, it’s the same for philanthropist Roshni Nadar Malhotra, the chair of HCL Technologies Ltd., a $48 billion outsourcing powerhouse founded by her dad. He gifted her the family’s controlling stake in March. Running the tech firm’s day-to-day operations is someone else’s job. Nadar is passionate about wildlife conservation, among other things.

Piramal is retaining 20% of VIP. But that’s just a financial investment in a publicly traded security. He’ll pare it down. Owners of unlisted firms are proceeding more slowly. A few months ago, the family behind Haldiram’s, a 90-year-old Indian snacks brand, parted with a minority stake to Singapore’s Temasek Holdings Pte and other global investors. Media reports put the firm’s valuation at $10 billion.

A scenario where India’s business elite is basically a bunch of rich financiers, living off accumulated wealth, doesn’t appeal to everyone. “What concerns me is that many in this generation are taking the easy way out, especially in the post-Covid world,” says billionaire Uday Kotak, who retired two years ago as managing director of Kotak Mahindra Bank, which he founded in the 1980s as a finance company. “They claim to be managing family offices and investments, trading in the stock market, allocating funds to mutual funds, and treating it as a full-time job.”

But they are probably just smart to realize that they’re sandwiched. On one hand, access to capital is no longer their abiding advantage. On the other, real economic power is concentrating in fewer hands. Viral Acharya, a former central bank deputy governor, has shown in his research that India’s top five nonfinancial groups have expanded their share of total assets by 8 percentage points in 30 years, whereas the next five business groups’ sway has shrunk by roughly the same amount.

From cement, steel, autos, power, and paints to retail, telecom, media, finance, and aviation, a handful of powerful conglomerates are pouncing on every new opportunity. No wonder the successors of tycoons like Mukesh Ambani, Gautam Adani and Sajjan Jindal are closely involved in management. Children from middling business families probably don’t see the point of entering a new field only to see it being disrupted by a startup — or dominated by a bigger player.

Many more Indian assets will change hands as their family owners ultimately lose interest in tending to them. In heading for the exit, Piramal, the luggage maker, has given a good indication of the direction of travel.