IN CONVERSATION

ABHINAV MATHUR

ABHINAV MATHUR

Vice President, Group Strategy, RPG Group

Please tell us a bit about your early life and career?

I am originally from Delhi. Most of my junior years were spent at Cambridge School, Noida, and I later joined DPS Noida to complete my high school. After a degree in Computer Science from NIT Jaipur, I decided to pursue an MBA from IIM-Lucknow. Thereafter, I have spent roughly 13 years in various roles, across the industry.

You have an interesting portfolio, and work closely with three very unique companies in the Speciality sector. How has your experience been, so far?

Strategically speaking, RPG Group is present in some very interesting sectors. If we were to try and draw the group from scratch, I’m very sure we would want to be present in pharma, agri, IT services – sectors we’re already present in, right? In fact, the foothold that we already have in these sectors is quite strong.

While I work on strategy at the group level, a large part what I do is also focused on Harrisons Malayalam Ltd (HML), where we work with Cherian George, the CEO (SBU-) and his team to help them devise and further develop their strategy. We also support RPG Life Sciences and Raychem RPG on specific projects.

This has been a very unique journey for me because I didn’t have hands-on experience in these sectors before I joined RPG. I’d done some work in pharma, but not in the other sectors. Since these are very diverse businesses, my learning curve at the Group was quite steep, yet enjoyable.

Where do you see RPG Group in the next five years?

The intention is clear. Through the past decade, we’ve been primarily focused on organic growth, making sure that our six companies are on the right path. But increasingly now, there’s a compelling desire to have breakout growth not only from our own companies but from sectors that could be adjacent or even diverse.

For example, at HML, we are creating agri drones and AI-based tools that will help with better crop yield forecasting, disease management and many other vital aspects of farming. All of these are potentially adjacent opportunities for the company, and could help position it as an Agri-Tech or aggregator company over the next decade.

At RPG Life Sciences, we are exploring the MedTech front as well as the API business with the management team, which is doing a great job in terms of delivering consistent results.

The hunger is there, and so is the real capital, real intention and real management bandwidth being devoted to exploring some of these new business areas. Over the next 4-5 years I’m very excited about how the Group can grow and become a larger entity than it is today.

What does ‘Hello Happiness’ mean to you?

For me, happiness at work would mean doing high-quality work, getting due recognition for it, delivering real impact and, as a result, winning in the marketplace.

Next

Hriday Mittal

Previous

RPG’s Chatbots, a personal assistant for everyone