Cyient founder BVR Mohan Reddy: ‘In many industries, IT and technology will converge - that is what the future looks like'

Cyient founder B.V.R. Mohan Reddy.

Padma Shri B.V.R. Mohan Reddy graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur in 1974. He worked at the DCM Group, MICO Bosch, HCL, and OMC Computers Ltd, prior to founding Cyient (then Infotech Enterprises Ltd), an Indian technology company, in 1991.

Hyderabad-based Reddy, now 71, has since grown Cyient into a profitable, multinational enterprise, with more than 15,000 employees. In his recent book Engineered in India: From Dreams to Billion-Dollar Cyient (Penguin Business, 2022), he gives the reader detailed insights into his journey and learnings over a nearly five-decade-long career.

In this interview, he speaks about building a company on values, his one mistake, and the convergence of IT and technology in the future. Edited excerpts:

It’s no secret that you’ve been successful in your corporate journey but tell us what is the biggest mistake you ever made?

The biggest mistake I made was in the initial years, when I was trying to decide whether I should also go into IT services.

I was unnerved when I did not get successful in engineering in the initial years, we found an adjacency called Geospatial Works. That worked very well for a bit… but given some of the peer-group pressures, so on and so forth, the acceptance of engineering R&D (research and development) was lower.

That was, I think, my biggest mistake. Had I just stayed put and made those same investments in ensuring we got the domain knowledge and expertise to persuade customers, we could have probably had success much faster.

So what propelled you to take the plunge into entrepreneurship on your return to India?

Turning 40, because I believed that was my last chance in life. I thought I had a very well-rounded ability to run business as I had done operations, marketing, sales, and then being a CEO of a company for around 10 years.

The next reason was that at the time, we were seeing an enormous amount of change in India. The P.V. Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh government led the winds of change. India also opened its eyes to focus on the area of export business, because we were starved of foreign exchange.

Remember, at that point in time, we were in a similar situation like Sri Lanka is today. I’m talking about 1991-92. So there wasn’t just a single factors but multiple things that said to me: ‘man jump, jump now’. That’s what made me an entrepreneur.

What according to you should start-up companies and their founders focus on as the landscape reinvents itself?

A start-up cannot go all over the place, you have to have a specific focus. People into start-ups need to understand that the product has to be really on target because you don’t get multiple opportunities. Also, you might have great ideas and/or a great team, but the ability to execute becomes extremely important. Only if you narrow down the focus, will you devote yourself to success. I would also like to add that failures are lessons to be learnt, because there is no way that an entrepreneur will not fail, for mistakes will happen.

Your company regularly generates revenues of more than half-a-billion dollars, and, earlier this year, you recorded a net profit of almost $20 million (around Rs 154 crore then) for one quarter. How much does striving for profit drive the way you work, live and do business?

To me, financial success means security in life. Our belief has been that there are four pillars on which this company has been built: the investors, including myself; the employees; my customers; and finally, society. We made our customers successful by giving them productivity improvement year after year. So, financial security gives you an ability, stability, allows you to do many more things in life, and contribute to a lot more people.

I had this enormous amount of gratification to say, "Look, I contributed something for my family, to myself." But equally important is that we share the wealth with wealth creators... A lot more people have benefitted; we have created as many as 18,000-plus jobs. Equally important was that, in the course of the last 30 years, we earned around $6 billion of foreign exchange, and that went through the proper channels. So, you’re helping others in nation-building, and there is a 4x or 5x multiple in terms of indirect employment.

Do you think you might have achieved what you have without your international exposure?

The ambition I had in my life was to go abroad and study. I feel that the educational standards of some of the premium institutions in India, such as the IITs, are as good as what happens in the top US universities. I thought my going outside of India would help me enormously in changing my way of thinking, ability to understand different cultures, ability to think laterally, and ability to accommodate other viewpoints. These were big lessons for me. The big bonus was that I also did a course in small-business management. I also returned as soon as I graduated.

The key driver for me is that I always saw an enormous amount of opportunity in this country, to return home and participate in nation-building as opposed to doing something in the US.

How do you see technology and IT changing in the next decade?

We think the lines between pure IT and technology are blurry, it will be purely a technology play. There is now a fairly large amount of hardware that also will contribute towards getting your information from various sources, that is then information technology. Where the information is coming from now are two sensors: your vision, hearing, taste, smell, and your feed, which is flowing into data. Going forward, in many industries, IT and technology will converge, that is what the future looks like.

One piece of advice you would give to every business person?

The takeaway is, build a company on values, because values go with you. And values will sustain themselves, irrespective of where you are in your life.