Interview Summary
Sanjay Lalbhai is Chair and Managing Director of Arvind Limited, the leading manufacturer of cotton shirting, denim, knits and khaki fabrics based in Ahmedabad, India. In this interview, Lalbhai begins by briefly discussing the origins of his family business in medieval times, and how over the last century, the firm has grown into one of India’s largest manufacturers of woven textiles. Lalbhai outlines the strategies the family adopted to overcome institutional challenges during the License Raj era between the 1950s and 1991, when government polices of licensing and exchange controls severely restricted entrepreneurship. Lalbhai then discusses finance in inflationary economies, business partnerships across mature and emerging markets, the role of gender in a family enterprise, leadership in a patriarchal-conglomerate setting, and achieving corporate social responsibility by building businesses that were sustainable and socially productive, rather than through philanthropy alone.
I believe that in emerging economies where all these opportunities come up for the first time, you don’t require a core sector expertise. You can partner with someone, or you can get brilliant people to come and setup the supply chain, or because the markets are there, there is no competition. You are starting from scratch.
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Additional Resources
Sheth, Sudev. “How to become the doyen of denim in licence raj." Mint, August 15, 2022.
Sheth, Sudev, Nataliya Nedzhvetskaya, and Alexander Hoppe. “Forging the International Brand: How Local Mills Leverage History to Build Global Brands." Academia Letters, January 2021, Article 121.
Sanjay Lalbhai on the future of Arvind, BQ Conversations, September 4, 2018.
Interview with Sanjay Lalbhai, CNBC Power Talk, April 11, 2018.
Church, Peter. Profiles in Enterprise. Inspiring Stories of Indian Business Leaders (Lotus, New Delhi, 2015), “Sanjay Lalbhai,” pp. 217-230.
Grant, Tina. “Arvind Ltd." International Directory of Company Histories 164 (2015): 13-17
Adhikari, Anand. “How Sanjay Lalbhai is reinventing Arvind." Business Today, June 15, 2008.
Tripathi, Dwijendra. The Dynamics of a Tradition: Kasturbhai Lalbhai and His Entrepreneurship. New Delhi: Manohar, 1981.
Interview Citation Format
Interview with Sanjay Lalbhai, interviewed by Sudev Sheth, Ahmedabad, India, February 6, 2019, Creating Emerging Markets Project, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.
