Arunachalam Vellayan, 1953-2025, former Chairman Murugappa Group, India, https://www.murugappa.com
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I received sad news this week that Arunachalam Vellayan, the former Chairman of Murugappa and a 4th generation member of the storied business family and a great grandson of the founder Dewan Bahadur Murugappa Chettiar passed away in Chennai on Monday 17 November at the age of 72 after a long illness.
This is my interview with Arunachalam Vellayan in 2012 when he was Chairman of Murugappa and he gave me a fascinating glimpse into the family history and the strategy the family has pursued. The group is one of India’s leading conglomerates and is a market leader in a number of sectors, including abrasives, auto components, cycles, sugar, farm inputs, fertilizers, plantations, bio-products and nutraceuticals.
The interview is covered in a chapter of my 2015 book - Profiles in Enterprise Inspiring stories of Indian business leaders published by Roli Books.
Like the interview just published on my interview with Anand Burman it is interesting to see how the Murugappa family has handled the role of women in the family and overall it is seems clear why the strategies of these two families have succeeded in modern India. What is unusual about the Murugappa group is its success internationally and particularly in South Africa.
I should also add this is my second podcast episode where I have used Speechify (https://speechify.com/) to turn my written word into speech using AI with an Australian voice. Apologies for any imperfections but certainly my experience so far is that AI can read far better than me.
Please note that these interviews took place some time ago - over 25 years ago in the case of the South East Asian life story book and around 10 to 15 years ago in the case of the two Indian life story books. However, their stories are correct to the time of the interviews and the objective is to demonstrate the entrepreneurial skills they exhibited at the time of the interviews in building their businesses.
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