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Multinational Conglomerate

Larsen & Toubro

Larsen & Toubro, Started With Dairy Equipment To Leading Indian Multinational Corporation.

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Founded in 1946, Larsen & Toubro is a market leader in almost every industry. The conglomerate has achieved and maintained leadership in its primary business sectors for more than eight decades due to a robust, customer-focused strategy and a never-ending pursuit of world-class quality.

About the Company

Larsen & Toubro, also known as L&T, is a leading Indian multinational corporation with business operations in various industries like construction, engineering, technology, manufacturing, financial services, and information technology. L&T is ranked among the top five construction firms worldwide. The company is headquartered in Mumbai, India. L&T Group consists of 118 subsidiaries, 25 joint ventures, six associates, and 35 joint operations corporations. The company is listed on the NSE and BSE. In 2022, it had a revenue of over $20 billion. It serves clients from various industries in more than 50 countries.

History

In 1938, Henning Larsen and Soren Toubro, two Danish engineers, formed a company in Bombay. The company started as a business that imported and sold Danish dairy equipment. Unfortunately, import limitations that came into effect after Germany invaded Denmark in 1940 severely hurt the company’s business. Despite their difficulties, the pair decided to stay in India and establish a local workshop to provide services and technical work. During World War II, they discovered a profitable commercial opportunity to construct and repair ships. As a result, Larsen & Toubro was founded. In 1940, the company received its first significant order to build a soda ash facility/plant for the Tata Group. The calibre of service and prompt service of L&T delighted numerous national and international businesses. They started working with lots of foreign players. Gradually, L&T also became a representative of various British equipment manufacturers for producing soaps, glass, hydrogenated oils, etc. In 1945, the company made a deal with the US-based Caterpillar Tractor to market earth-moving machinery.

In 1946, L&T was incorporated, and it established offices in Madras, Calcutta, and New Delhi. In 1950, it went public and became a listed company. The company was selected as a contractor for constructing nuclear reactors in 1965. L&T was invited by Dr. Homi Bhabha, the Atomic Energy Commission’s (AEC) chairman at the time, to provide vital parts for atomic reactors in the 1950s. L&T began to obtain major projects from the ISRO in the 1970s and 1980s. In order to design weapon and missile systems, it also collaborated with DRDO.

Larsen & Toubro
Image source: moneycontrol.com

Operations

L&T is also a top supplier of design-to-delivery services for India’s defence industry. It builds underground facilities, military installations, and storage facilities. Additionally, L&T provides a selection of defence-related vessels, such as warships, submarines, support vessels, and unique naval platforms. An important participant in India’s Public-Private Partnership (PPP) initiatives is L&T Infrastructure Development Projects Ltd. It has finished significant projects in several important industries, including renewable energy, transmission and distribution lines, ports, water supply, etc. The world’s largest metro project under PPP form is the L&T Metro Rail in Hyderabad. It extends over three corridors for 69.2 kilometers.

Founders – Henning Holck-Larsen, Søren Kristian Toubro

Henning Holck-Larsen and Soren Kristian Toubro, two Danish engineers, established L&T in Bombay in 1938. They were equally dedicated to enhancing India’s engineering capacity to fulfill market demands. Danish classmates Henning Larsen and Soren Toubro, who were studying India in history classes, perhaps never imagined that they would one day write the history of that auspicious country. The two companions made the decision to leave the conveniences of living in Europe in 1938 and launch their own business in India instead.

CEO – S N Subrahmanyan

S N Subrahmanyan is the CEO and Managing Director of Larsen & Toubro. He has been serving as the company’s CEO since 2017. In 1984, he started working with Larsen & Toubro’s ECC Division. He has an MBA from Symbiosis, Pune and also attended London Business School.

Wipro

Wipro – India’s One Of The Largest Multinational Conglomerates Founded During The British Period.

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Wipro, founded in 1945, is one of the largest employers in India. It is a multinational company that was featured in Forbes Global 2000 list as well as Fortune India 500 list. It has more than 230,000 employees and has customers around the globe. Only one year after establishing the company, it was taken public in 1946 and was listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange and National Stock Exchange of India. Azim Premji, an Indian businessman, and engineer is the main brain behind the company. The current CEO of the company is Thierry Delaporte.

About Wipro

Wipro, though started out as a company for manufacturing vegetable and refined oil, has expanded to many other sectors in the last seven decades. It has launched health care, personal care, lightning products, etc, and offers services such as consulting and outsourcing. Wipro has also been a recipient of many prestigious awards and honors. In 2010, Wipro was given the Microsoft Country Partner of the Year Award for India. After a couple of years, it also ranked 2nd in the list of Global 500 Green companies by Newsweek. Subsidiaries of Wipro are Appirio, Topcoder, Capco, and Designit.

Wipro
Image source: www.financialexpress.com

Founding Days

Mohamed Premji incorporated Wipro in Alamner, India as Western Inia Products. Later, the company’s name was abbreviated to Wipro. The company initially became a manufacturer of various kinds of cooking and edible oil under the trade names of Kisan, Camel, and Sunflower. The company was slowly growing and it was in 1966 that Mohamed Premji passed away giving the reigns to his son, Azim Premji. He became the Chairman of the company only at the age of 21. It was under Azim Premji’s leadership and guidance that took Wipro into the IT industry, for what it is famous today. It was during the 1970s that Company gradually started finding opportunities in the IT and computing industry. So, in 1977 the company’s name was changed from Western India Vegetables Products Limited to Wipro Products Limited.

After the IT industry, Wipro also expanded its product line by introducing beauty products, hydraulic cylinders, and industrial cylinders. In 1989, the company started a partnership with General Electric for expanding into the healthcare sector by manufacturing diagnostic and imaging products. The company also launched its fluid power division and toiletries product line for babies. In 1995, the company also set up an overseas design center for international clients. By the end of the decade, the company acquired Wipro Acer and introduced new products like Wipro SuperGenius personal computers. The company also started offering internet services in India after starting a joint venture with a Dutch company. In 2000, Company got listed on New York Stock Exchange.

Expansion and Success

The next decade started with a huge success as Wipro became the first software company in India to be ISO 14001 certified. Wipro started a new product line of CFL under the brand name Wipro Smartlite. The company also partnered with Intel for i-Siksha. Wipro also started acquiring several companies starting with cMango Inc in 2006, Oki Techno Centre Singapore Pte Ltd (OTCS) in 2007, and establishing an R&D partnership with Nokia Siemens Network.

In 2008, the company entered into the clean energy business and acquired the global oil and gas division of SAIC. Some of the other companies that Wipro acquired in the following years are Promax Applications Group, Appirio, Rational Interaction, Capco, etc. Recently, Company has also partnered with IBM software systems to launch its 5G solutions. It also expanded its business to Bangladesh a few years ago and extensively invested in the European market.

About Azim Premji

Azim Premji is the founder chairman of Wipro who took responsibility for the business after his father passed away. He was born in a Gujarati Muslim family in Bombay. Azim Premji completed his graduation from Standford University and returned back to India immediately and started working for the company. In 2005, he received Padma Bhushan for his contribution to trade and commerce.

Roper Technologies

Roper Technologies – The Journey Of A Home Appliances Maker To Becoming A Conglomerate.

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Technology has become an essential part of our lives, and we can’t only include computer and mobile technology in the category, but it has a vast scope. There are companies that specialize in one niche, but many are there to offer almost every type of technology service. Roper Technologies is one such conglomerate with an extended scope. The company is based in America and serves diversified industries and offers services like radio Frequency Technology, Industrial Technology, Scientific Technology, Energy Systems, Controls, etc. The company is a unicorn with a worth over 3 billion annual revenues.

About Roper Technologies

Roper Technologies was founded in 1890, over a century ago. It started as a home appliances company and later expanded into miscellaneous technology-related products. George D. Roper was the founder of the company, and Neil Hunn is the current president and CEO of Roper Technologies. It is a publically traded company and trades on New York Stock Exchange as ROP. The products by the company include Industrial technology, radio frequency (RF) technology, scientific and industrial imaging, energy systems and controls, and instrumentation. As of 2021, over 1800 thousand people were working for Roper, and it made annual revenues worth US$ 3,238.128 million in 2013. The company is operational in more than 100 countries.

Roper Technologies
Image source: getlogo.net

The Founding

George D. Roper is the founder of Roper Technology Inc. He founded the company in 1890 as the manufacturer of home appliances. The journey of Roper to become a conglomerate started with multiple acquisitions. In 1906, the company acquired Trahem Pump Co., and in the following years, it acquired names like David Bradley Manufacturing Works (1966), Sunquest Information Systems (2012), Vertafore (2020), etc. These acquisitions made the company start services like pump manufacturing, outdoor lawn equipment, radio frequency identification(RFID), diagnostic and laboratory software (development), etc.

In the period of hundred years, the ownership for the company and its subsidiaries also went under other players who were responsible for the overall growth of Roper. The Florence Stove Co. of Kankakee had acquired the Roper’s stove business in 1957. Electrolux took over the company’s lawn and garden equipment wing in 1988. In 1989, Whirlpool Corporation acquired Roper as a whole brand and had an IPO in 1992. Roper was operating as Roper Industries Inc, and in 2015, it had a name change to Roper Technologies Inc. Today, Roper is operational in over 100 countries. It operates through its subsidiaries, including DAP Technologies, IPA, LLC, Media Cybernetics, Princeton Instruments, Roper Pump Co., DAT Solutions and TransCore, Data Innovations, ConstructConnect, and DAT Solutions, etc.

The CEO at Roper Technologies

Neil Hunn is the president and CEO at Roper Technologies Inc. He has got a bachelor’s degree in finance and accounting from Miami University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Hunn started his career at Deloitte Consulting as a Business Analyst. He then worked at The Parthenon Group for a year as a consultant and switched to MedAssets in 2001, working as the SVP, Corporate Development. After working for over five years, he was promoted to be the Chief Financial Officer in 2007 and then the President of the Revenue Cycle Technology in the same company in 2010.
Hunn joined the Roper Group in 2011 and worked as the President of the medical segment of Roper Technologies. In July 2017, he became the Executive Vice President, and in 2018, he was promoted to be the COO of the company. Hunn became the President and Chief Executive Officer at Roper Technologies in 2018.

Naver Corporation

Naver Corporation – A South Korean Multinational Conglomerate Offering The Topmost Search Portal In The Country.

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Born in 1999, Naver Corporation is a South Korean company that started offering search services at the beginning of the 21st century. Naver’s headquarters is based in Seongnam, South Korea. The company is known for pioneering in user-generated content in its early days and it has several other services (encyclopedia, cafe, blog, etc). It also has several subsidiaries that include Line, Snow, Camp Mobile, Naver Labs, etc. The company is also trying to evolve its technology platform and hence closely cooperating with tech startups. Naver was also recognized by Forbes as one of the most innovative companies in the world and was also featured in Fortune magazine.

About Naver Corporation

NAVER is the top search portal in South Korea and the company’s other subsidiaries and affiliates offer services like digital comic platforms, messenger, social media platforms, metaverse platforms, etc. Naver has also expanded to the international markets in the last two decades. It has offices in Japan, the USA, France, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, China, and Taiwan. There are nearly 3,000 employees in the company and its current CEO is Choi Soo Yeon. Naver was originally founded by Lee Hae Jin under the name of Naver Comm. It has made several acquisitions in the past decade and merged with many companies to expand its territory.

Naver Corporation
Image source: www.korea.net

History

In June 1999, Lee Hae Jin established Naver Comm. and its main product was the search engine, Naver. Since Naver was a search portal the company decided to roll out a similar search engine for the children and hence named it Junior Naver. After a year, the company merged with Hangame Communications Inc, Search Solutions, Oneque, and several other companies. In August 2000, Naver decided to roll out its comprehensive search product that allowed users to get a variety of search results from a single query on a single page. And the search results were organized by types like blogs, products, images, etc. In the same year, the company also established Hangame Japan.

Entering a new decade, the company changed its name to NHN (Next Human Network) Corporation. But the two divisions of the company, Naver and Hangame continued operating under their original brand names. In 2002, Naver became a public company and also launched a new service, Naver Knowledge iN. It also began a donation service called Happy Bean. It was in 2003 that the company merged all of its Japanese subsidiaries into NHN Japan and after a few years launched Naver Japan to start its search engine in the country. Eventually, the company also expanded to the USA and opened the American game service, ijji but sold it away shortly.

In 2008, it was for the first time that the company’s name was featured in Forbes magazine and after a year the CEO of NHN was also featured in Forbes’ Asia’s Fab 50 list. In the next few years, Naver focuses on strengthening the social media business as it acquired a Japanese blog platform, Livedoor, and also launched Line, a messaging application. In 2013, NHN was split into two divisions, Naver Corporation and NHN Entertainment and in the same year, Naver became the first company to operate its own data center. By the end of 2015, the company’s global revenue started exceeding rapidly especially because of the global affiliate services.

Global Expansion

As the company’s annual revenue started exceeding 4 trillion won, many of its affiliates also started filing IPO and going public. The number of subsidiaries of the company also started increasing and some of the new ones include Snow, Naver Labs, and Naver Webtoon. In 2021, Naver acquired Wattpad for $600 million. Line Corporation, the biggest subsidiary of Naver merged with Yahoo Japan in 2021. Naver’s current focus is to start competing with the biggest tech giants of the world like Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc.

About the Founder

Famous as the founder of Naver Corporation, Lee Hae-jin is a 54-year old billionaire. He is one of the top twenty richest people in South Korea and his business venture started while he was already working for Samsung in the late 1990s. Lee went to Seoul National University followed by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.

SoftBank Group

SoftBank Group – The Famous Multinational Conglomerate Founded By A Young Japanese Entrepreneur.

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Founded in 1981, SoftBank Group is one of the largest multinational conglomerates based in Japan. The company generates annual revenue of more than $50 billion and employs approximately 80,000 people worldwide. Masayoshi Son, a Japanese tech entrepreneur, founded the company when he was 24-year old. Currently, the headquarters of the company is located in Minato, Tokyo and it mainly focuses on investment management. The major sectors where SoftBank mainly invests are finance, energy, and tech. SoftBank Group is also responsible for running the world’s largest tech-based venture capital fund, Vision Fund where the main investors belong to the Middle Eastern countries.

Early Days Of SoftBank Group

SoftBank Group, today, is the second-largest publicly-traded company in Japan after Toyota. Back in 1981, when Masayoshi Son founded SoftBank, it operated as a software distributor. After a year, SoftBank entered into the publishing business and launched a couple of magazines about NEC and Sharp computers. By 1989, SoftBank became the largest magazine publisher in the computer and tech category. The company decided to go public in 1994 when the company was valued at $3 million. Next year, it acquired a publishing company. Ziff Davis for $2.1 billion and expanded its market to the US.

After buying Ziff Davis, the company bought COMDEX for $800 million and later sold it to Key3Media. Masayoshi Son made a huge investment in internet services during the 1990s and entered into a joint venture with Yahoo! In 1996. This partnership led to the creation of Yahoo! Japan, a very popular website in the country. SoftBank became a holding company in 1999 and in 2000 it invested a huge amount in Alibaba that turned into a big profit. In the 21st century, Son decided to expand the Asian market and started with an investment in multiple Korean companies that provides internet services.

SoftBank Group
Image source: wccftech.com

Expansion And Acquisition

Since Son was heavily investing in the internet and telecommunication market, SoftBank Group decided to acquire Vodafone Japan in 2005. This acquisition made SoftBank a very dominating company in Japan’s telecom operator’s business. After acquiring Vodafone Japan, SoftBank also acquired a 23% stake in Betfair and entered a collaboration with Tiffany & Co. In 2010, SoftBank acquired a 13.7% stake in Ustream. After a couple of years, the company announced that it is planning to acquire Sprint Nextel (70% stake) which during the final agreement became 78%. Later, the company acquired more shares and owned 80% of the company.

In 2013, the company acquired a 51% stake in Supercell and heavily invested in OlaCabs, Snapdeal, and Housing.com. The same year, it acquired a controlling stake in Aldeberan Robotics and renamed the company SoftBank Robotics. In 2015, Son decided to bring Nikesh Arora, a former Google Executive onboard and made him the Representative Director and President of SoftBank. Since SoftBank was investing in Korean companies, the company decided to invest $1 billion in Coupang, a Korean e-commerce website. In 2016, SoftBank announced the plans to acquire ARM Holdings for $32 billion which was the company’s largest deal in its history. The same year Son had a meeting with Former US President, Donald Trump after which SoftBank decided to invest $50 billion in the US market to create jobs.

Present Days

In 2021, SoftBank announced a huge profit of approximately $37 billion from its Vision Fund and the Korean e-commerce website, Coupang. The annual profit of SoftBank in the financial year 20-21 was the largest recorded profit in the industrial history of Japan. The company has planned a series of acquisitions in 2021 which includes the acquisition of stakes in AutoStore, Yanolja (a Korean hotel booking platform), etc. SoftBank has also decided to sell its T-Mobile US shares to Deutsche Telekom.

About The Founder

Masayoshi Son is a famous Japanese billionaire, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He received Japanese citizenship in 1990 and he was born on a Japanese island, Kyushu in 1957. Currently, Son is the second richest man in Japan and the 68th richest man across the world according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index. At the age of sixteen, Son left for California and studied at the University of California, Berkeley. While he was a student, he was interested in technology and entrepreneurship and created his first electronic translator and sold it to Sharp Corporation.

Sina Corporation

Sina Corporation – A Chinese Tech Company Providing A Microblogging Platform Similar To Twitter.

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Sina Corporation is a famous multinational conglomerate based in China. It has three headquarters in Shanghai, Beijing, and the Cayman Islands. In November 1998, Wang Zhidong, Wang Yan, Ben Tsiang, and Hurst Lin founded Sina Corporation. The company had mainly four lines of business which are Sina Weibo, Sina Mobile, Sina Online, and Sinanet. Currently, Charles Chao is the CEO of the company has more than 60,000 employees. There are more than 100 million people worldwide who use the products and services of Sina Corporation. In 2003, the company was named “China’s Media of the Year” by Southern Weekend.

About Sina Corporation

The four founders founded Sina Corporation in Beijing in 1998 and after a couple of years established its financial headquarters in Shanghai. The company mainly focuses on offering its platform and services to Chinese users globally. It has 100 million registered users of which 10 million engages in free-based services. Apart from the users of China, the company also has Chinese users from North America.

Sina provides different types of services worldwide and has thirteen access points within Greater China and also tailored pages for overseas nations. International markets include Japan, Korea, the US, Australia, Europe, and Germany. The microblogging platform of Sina is also very famous such that more than 5,000 companies and across 2,500 media organizations in China use it.

Sina Corporation
Image source: g.foolcdn.com

Major Sina Businesses

Though the company has four business lines, Sina Weibo is the most famous and revenue-generating of all. Sina Weibo is a microblog social network, a platform similar to Twitter, and the largest social networking service in the Chinese language. Based on the number of active users, Sina Weibo dominates 56.5% of the microblogging market in China. In the Sina Weibo platform, the company has more than 500 million active users and the browsing time is also comparatively more than any other competitors of Sina.

The cloud computing market of Sina Corporation also dominates the Chinese market. This is because Sina App Engine (SAE) is the earliest and the largest such platform in the country. Sina launched this platform in 2009 and this product is dedicated to web deployment, and hosting services for various corporations as well as independent developers. Currently, more than 300,000 developers in China are using the SAE platform.

History Of The Company

Sina Corporation was founded as a result of the merger between the two largest Chinese websites. In 1996, the most traffic generated internet portal of China SRSNet was established which later merged with Sinanet, a website that was developed in 1995 for the American Chinese community. After the merger of these two websites, Sina Corporation was founded and the services were extended to North America and Hong Kong. The merger lead Sina Corporation to outrun its rivals like Sohu and NetEase in terms of the most visited portal site. Sina Corporation started expanding very quickly in terms of launching new services and that way it attracted new customers.

In April 2000, Sina Corporation became the first company to get approved for listing in the Nasdaq National market through a variable interest entity (VIE) in the Cayman Islands. Sina was closely followed by its rivals in the following months of the same year to get listed in the same. In 2000, the official website of the company was selected for online coverage for the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney. In 2015, the online portal of Sina was attacked as there were certain allegations that it contained distorted facts and violated morality. Recently, Blizzard Entertainment sued Sina Games related to a game called Glorius Saga.

Charles Chao – CEO of Sina Corporation

Charles Chao is the current president and CEO of Sina Corporation. He joined the company back in 1999 when Sina faced various obstacles to get listed in NASDAQ. Charles made great efforts to establish Sina as a VIE which cleared the path for the company. Charles, before becoming the CEO of the company, also served as the CFO and COO. He is also the Chairman of the Board of Sina Corporation.