March 15, 1999
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MASTEK:ASHANK DESAI Valued Chain "My life is Indian but my business vision is entirely global".
Today, Mastek is a spellbinding success story with its 1997-98 revenue of Rs 91.79 crore jumping to an estimated Rs 160 crore this fiscal. Its share price has jumped to over Rs 950, from Rs 730 before the budget, on the expectation of its earning higher dollar revenue following an imminent devaluation of the rupee against the dollar. Desai, 47, has the rational mind of an engineer and the savvy of a Gujarati businessman. He operates from the Mastek headquarters at Mumbai's seepz, where every car is checked on entry, and has spun off his international operations as subsidiaries. That helps him protect his vast dollar income from India's currency risk. A club man and a keen squash player, he says, "My life is Indian but my business vision is entirely global." Mastek is a classic example of a typical Indian software tinker-tailor learning the ropes the hard way, attempting to graduate from a mere service provider to making products like strac, a software package being used by stockbrokers in Malaysia, and Elixir, for insurance business in Singapore. Nine per cent of its revenue this year is expected to come from products. From service to product. That's the road up the value chain for Indian software companies. |
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Given an option, Ashank Desai, a graduate in
mechanical engineering from IIT Bombay and a student of the IIM Ahmedabad, would have
become an executive at Godrej, the company that sent him to the business school. But, like
most computer freaks of his generation, the 47-year-old Desai spent his weekends at IIM
chalking out plans to revolutionise the country's information management system. In that
exercise he had a few colleagues with him. However, he had an advantage over his
batchmates by living in a Godrej flat. After passing out from IIM, the others shared his
flat, his dream and the Rs 15,000 share capital when their company, Mastek Limited, was
launched in 1982. The budding entrepreneurs, however, had difficulty in making both ends
meet. The "jobs" that came by mostly involved computerising production planning,
known as "material resource planning" in the '80s lingo. The remunerations were
insignificant, with an order value of Rs 30,000 calling for celebration. 
