If I had to pick one from Aditya Birla’s plethora of product lines that made a huge impact in my life, it would definitely be their apparel line. The brands under the apparel line are not just brands, but their emotions we have grown up with. Louis Philippe, Allen Solly, Van Heusen, Peter England express our emotions that we relate to all our life. These brands immediately pull me to my father. All my life, I have seen my father stay loyal to these brands. We can have a string of options in front of us, he would choose these brands no matter what. We have always looked up to our fathers, and our fathers tell us what is good and bad. My father stuck to quality and brand , and that is what has made him stick to Louis Philippe, Allen Solly, Van Heusen and Peter England. They have always stood as an example of what a premium product is. The most overwhelming irony to this childhood memory of Aditya Birla products, is when I was able to gift the same to my father with the first salary I drew! I was able to get my father something he considered dear to his heart, something exquisite, something I grew up thinking was a premium product, I could gift to my father.
Liberalization caught India’s business families much like a deer in the headlights of an onrushing car. Mostly, it left them confused and wary of what it would mean to their fortunes. After all, the licence-permit raj that the reforms of 1991 sought to dismantle had been put in place with these same businessmen in mind. The politicians of the socialist era needed the moneybags of corporate India. Elections then, as much as now, were won with hard cash and the promise of largesse later. Torn between the urge to preserve and protect on one hand and exploit the many new opportunities on the other, many wavered, fatally in some cases. The Birla group led by Aditya Birla worked on its strengths in commodities and showed how to make successful ventures abroad by setting up plants in South-East Asia and Egypt. Aditya Birla’s untimely death in 1995 brought his son Kumar Mangalam Birla into the leadership position at the young age of 28 and he too embraced the tenets of a competitive modern economy. After a decade of internal reform, Kumar Mangalam Birla attracted widespread attention by acquiring Novelis, a Canadian rolled aluminum producer with a subsidiary in South Korea, at USD 6 billion (approx. KRW 6.7 trillion) in 2007, making the Aditya Birla Group the world''s largest rolled aluminum producer. It was a move to take advantage of the growth of aluminum-related industries stemming from rising demand for non-ferrous metals. The reforms of 1991 and the gradual opening up of the economy didn’t as much as offer the more adventurous of Indian business families the opportunities for growth as they removed the artificial shackles that had held back their predecessors. Now, however, a new and vastly different set of challenges face these same families: leadership issues in an era of far more stringent corporate governance standards and shareholder activism, the pressures of increasingly globalized businesses where the headwinds are both unpredictable and uncontrollable, the need to take cognizance of environmental and social factors, a vastly more complex workforce and, of course, the ever present political uncertainties magnified by the fractured polity and increasing federalism.