NEW DELHI: Yogesh Chander Deveshwar or 'Yogi' Deveshwar as his friends called him, Group Chairman of ITC, passed away into the great unknown, leaving behind a legacy of turning the Kolkata-based consumer goods giant into a conglomerate 'which also manufactures cigarettes'.
Lahore-born Deveshwar, an alumnus of IIT, Delhi and Harvard Business School who took over as CEO of the 114-year-old ITC in 1996, came in at the fag end of a battle for control between the board-run Indian tobacco maker and its UK-based parent British American Tobacco, which saw ITC remain Indian.
However, 'Yogi', who turned 72 this February, will be remembered in Indian corporate history as the man under whose watch Virginia House, ITC’s registered headquarters in Kolkata, saw its stock prices soar 50-fold and its revenues grow 16-fold. ITC also diversified at a fast pace into a true-blue consumer goods company making products ranging from Yippee noodles to Fiama soaps to Wills apparel, instead of just being a tobacco company that it had been for most of its lifetime.
ITC’s revenue shares from its tobacco business under his stewardship declined to 41 per cent from nearly three quarters about 16 years back as part of a conscious decision to grow out of the tobacco business. Today the percentage of employees ITC has in its non-cigarette businesses account for 88 per cent and the percentage of investments in non-cigarette brands accounts for 90 per cent of ITC’s total investments.
The move away from smoke sticks had started in AN Haksar’s tenure as ITC Chairman from 1969 to 1983 when Virginia House made tentative forays into hotels and paperboards. KL Chugh, Deveshwar’s predecessor, had dreams of diversifying further and even launching a charter airline, but spent much of his time fighting state taxation policies against cigarettes.
It was left to Deveshwar to vigorously pursue the agenda after selling off ITC’s financial arm and edible oils businesses early in his term as CEO. The sales of these two arms came after a vexed initial two years when he had to fight off accusations against ITC of foreign exchange violations and excise tax underpayments from his predecessor’s time.
However, in the first two years of this century, he also launched a successful stationary products range, the Wills Lifestyle Retail chain, set up ITC Infotech, and forayed into the packaged food business under the Aashirvad brand. Over the years he kept adding to that range – Sunfeast biscuits, Bingo potato chips, Fiama soaps and Yippee noodles, not to mention a popular incense brand.
At the same time, ITC Hotels kept expanding, taking over existing hotels and palaces and building new properties to turn a 3-hotel brand into a 100-hotel chain. By 2011, 'Yogi' had grown into a brand of his own and the government recognized him with a Padma Bhushan. But for the corporate world, his real epaulette came in 2016, when he catapulted ITC’s revenues to cross the Rs 50,000 crore-a-year mark.
Cancer struck soon after and Deveshwar named his hand-picked successor Sanjiv Puri as CEO and went on to become a non-executive Chairman. As one of his serving Vice Presidents said, “He was a good human being, a tough taskmaster and someone whose thoughts centred only around ITC all his life.”