A family man with two sons, who made it a point to attend all weddings and occasions in the community, Siddhartha is known by everyone as the quintessential ‘nice guy’ CEO -- never yelling, raising his voice or screaming at his employees, says Pavan Lall.
Soft-spoken, polite, and uninterested in the limelight, is how most who have known V G Siddhartha, chairman and managing director of India’s first home-grown national coffee chain, Café Coffee Day, describe the entrepreneur.
While his wife Malavika Hegde is daughter to S M Krishna, the former chief minister of Karnataka, it’s an association that Siddhartha detested to draw up on or refer to, even instructing his public relations team to ensure such references were strictly to be avoided while promoting his brand and companies.
Part of Karnataka’s Gowda community, which consists of landlords and village heads, ‘VG’ as he is referred to got an economics degree from Mangalore University before he took a small loan from his father to experiment in the stock market, and then landed in Mumbai to work at JM Financial, learn all about the stock exchange and how deals were done.
That gave him the platform to start his ventures with. In due course, he would go on to set up a cluster of businesses, of which the best known would be CCD.
VG is considered to be the hardest working entrepreneur most people said they’ve met. Frugal to a fault, VG is known to take the earliest flight in the morning and the last flight out at night, so that there’s no waste of money on a hotel when on business travel.
He would even insist on doing business meetings at CCD locations, say those who knew him. “I’m proud of what I have built,” he would say.
Malavika Hegde: Wife of V G Siddhartha and daughter of former Karnataka CM, SM Krishna, she is in charge of the overall responsibilities of operating the hospitality business since 2008.
S V Ranganath: An officer of Karnataka of 1975 cadre of the Indian Administrative Service, Ranganath has worked as a civil servant in various capacities, including as the Chief Secretary, Government of Karnataka and Principal Secretary to the Chief Minister of Karnataka. He was on the board of directors of Indian Investment Centre, Abu Dhabi, Industrial Finance Corporation of India.
Dr Albert Hieronimus: An Independent Director was also on the Board of Mindtree Limited for a span of 11 years, Hieronimus was previously been the Chairman of the executive board at Bosch Rexroth AG since February 2008. He has over 30 years of experience in the Mannesmann and Bosch group companies. In 2003, he became the Chairman of Motor Industries Company Limited.
Sanjay Omprakash Nayar: A non-executive and nominee director, Nayyar is currently the chief executive officer of KKR India. Prior to joining KKR in 2009, he has worked with Citigroup for nearly 24 years where he was the chief executive officer for India operations for the period from 2002 to 2009.
Sulakshana Raghavan: The managing director of Landor Mumbai, Raghavan is working Landor for more than eighteen years. She has worked at Landor’s San Francisco, New York and London offices in various roles including naming manager, brand strategist, corporate strategist and client director before setting up Landor in Mumbai and then heading the business.
He grew the coffee chain, which was set up in 1996, to around 1,600 outlets in India and a few overseas locations, with consolidated operating revenues of Rs 4,264 crore in 2018-19, and while he did run more than one venture, it was CCD -- coffee accounted for nearly half of the revenue -- that he wanted to primarily build into a global chain, often talking about in public fora and expressing how high-street retail was the future.
Coffee Day Enterprises, the listed company, which operates CCD and has controlling stakes in Sical Logistics and financial services company Way2Wealth, reported a total debt of around Rs 6,550 crore as of March.
Siddhartha’s stake in Coffee Day Enterprises was 53.93 per cent, of which 75.7 per cent was pledged as of June 2019.
Overall, Siddhartha’s business has been under pressure, but not to the point that he would need to take drastic steps, says one vendor who has worked closely with him and added that his payments were late on occasion but he always made good.
Those who worked with him during his initial public offering for CCD add that VG has been that rare entrepreneur with a conscience and deeply affected when unable to pay back borrowed money.
“Some business people can default and still sleep well at night -- not VG,” said one associate.
A senior Mumbai-based chartered accountant, who has worked closely with him, agrees: “VG can be certainly considered strong-willed, but not thick-skinned.”
People who have known him go on to add that VG has been an aggressive deal-maker, possessed high levels of self-confidence. A financier says there could be higher debt at the holding companies’ level, which is not known in the public domain so far.
A family man with two sons, who made it a point to attend all weddings and occasions in the community, Siddhartha is known by everyone as the quintessential ‘nice guy’ CEO -- never yelling, raising his voice or screaming at his employees.
According to an Outlook Business feature that Siddhartha participated in three years ago, there are clear signs of his core values.
“Name is more important than money,” he said in the story, indicating that reputation above all is what he prized.
He goes on to highlight his lifetime highs and lows: he was miserable when his stock listed 18 per cent below issue price, and was most enthused about employing 43,000 people and aspired to be amongst the top three coffee brands worldwide.
“I cannot think of anyone who has been VG’s enemy,” says a distant cousin, who declined to be named.
“It appears to be a case of him being unable to digest his failure to tackle a system working against him.”
What the PE investors have to say
- Café Coffee Day founder V G Siddhartha could be referring to a debt deal, say private equity industry insiders, when he wrote in a letter that he was under pressure from a PE firm to buy back shares.
- It could be a mezzanine or structured debt deal, where non-payment of principal can trigger other covenants such as a put option, requiring the borrower to buy back preference shares or debentures, say insiders. The lender could be the credit arm of a large private equity firm.
- CCD has three PE investors -- KKR India, Rivendell PE (formerly New Silk Route) and Affirma Capital, which manages the portfolio of Standard Chartered PE -- who tried to say they are not responsible for the unfortunate event.
- “We have never discussed a buyback and have always been very supportive of the business,” said an investor.
- These investors together held 22.35 per cent stake in CCD valued at Rs 724 crore at the end of April-June quarter.
- '…We are deeply saddened by the developments and our thoughts are with his family at this time. We believe in VG Siddhartha and had invested in the company about nine years ago. We sold approximately 4.25 per cent (of our total holding of approximately 10.3 per cent in the company) in February 2018 on the stock exchange and have not sold any shares before or after,' KKR said in an emailed statement.
- In a letter left by Siddhartha who went missing on Monday, he wrote, ''I gave up as I could not take any more pressure from one of the private equity partners forcing me to buy back shares, a transaction I had partially completed six months ago by borrowing a large sum of money from a friend.'
- -- Ranju Sarkar
