July 10, 2000

Yeh dil mange more
The two advertising agencies doing battle for the cola kings have already slugged it out on these pages, so let me punch in a non-cola drinking viewers’ opinion. Forget the statistics and the debate, as far as advertising recall goes, Pepsi has no competition at all. Also, it has won the war in style, creating slogans that have captured the fancy of an entire nation. Its true that there was fairly tame and irritating stuff too, like the ‘‘Eat Cricket, Sleep Cricket’’ slugfest. But, the ‘‘Nothing official about it’’ campaign — the coup which spoiled Coke’s World Cup has probably made Pepsi eternally grateful to its advertising agency. The other big one was the Dil mange more campaign.

The slogan gained immortality with Captain Vikram Batra, the Param Vir Chakra awardee saying the words in the context of the Kargil just before he was martyred during the battle for Tiger Hill. It demonstrates the sort of mindshare and recall that Pepsi dare not speak about without being labelled downright crass. But there is no doubt at all that the television image of the brave Batra’s had had an entire nation all choked up. Finally, there is the Hritik commercial. From the viewer point of view, Coke took a mega sensation and wasted him with a soppy story line. Pepsi may be number two around the world, but it seems the big winner in India — and that is not a sponsored opinion.

Wage notes
The battle for the housing turf is getting all as vicious as the cola wars. The battle here is between HDFC and ICICI (no also rans) and we will bring you frequent reports from the front. For the moment, a reader (shareholder) has mailed us the salaries of HDFC’s ‘‘Big Guys’’ which were kept out of its annual report. Chairman Deepak Parekh draws Rs 46.6 lakh, less than half that of his rival K.V.Kamath in ICICI even minus ESOPs. Its MD, Deepak Satwalekar takes home Rs 30.1 lakh — no comparison at all to Lalita Gupte or even Bhojani.

Others are K.M.Mistry (Rs 28 lakh), Renu Karnad (Rs 17.8 lakh), and the General Managers M.G. Barve (12.4 lakh), Satish Mehta (10.6 lakh), S. N. Shroff (10.3 lakh) and Susil Kumar (10.2 lakh). Our reader agrees that HDFC is probably embarrassed at ‘‘how many of them are so small in relation to comparable organisations!’’ and says that even if one takes into account the stock options, HDFC is probably ‘‘much better placed than Hindustan Lever to give a thumping big raise to its employees - at least to those who are performing!’

Topiwallah v/s tiewallah
There was a time when India’s oldest stock exchange was proud of its image as the good old desi exchange comprising topiwallah brokers and traders as compared to the upstart, automated, institutional, tiewallah National Stock Exchange (NSE). Globalisation and Anand Rathi’s tenure as President has changed all that — today the BSE is more tiewallah than the NSE. Probably part of its image to attract the attention of the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ. In the meanwhile, the NSE which is the richer exchange seems to be continuously expanding its turf with strategic investments in a range of businesses. It now has tie-ups with CRISIL for index products, with IL & FS for a debt market portal and HDFC Bank. It is also looking at doing more with its broker-testing module having already initiated talks with a couple of companies.

The SHCIL audit
There is more on the anonymous letter that has alleged irregularities at the Stock Holding Corporation of India (SHCIL). Though the last board meeting did not discuss the letter, it has been referred to the Audit Committee for inquiry. Also, P.S.Subramaniam is expected to be far more hands-on than SHCIL’ss past chairpersons and probe issues raised by the letter. In fact, Subramaniam, was to be inducted as Chairman at an even earlier board meeting and had walked away with irritation at what he considered were delaying tactics by the management. He is particularly keen on a proper reconciliation of securities, both physical and demat ones in SHCIL’ss possession.

 

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The author's e-mail address is: suchetadalal@yahoo.com

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