“In three years, we want to be $1 billion in revenue,” says Valiveti Bhaskar, CFO, Opto Circuits. From its current revenue of nearly $440 million, that implies a growth of over 2.2 times.
A stretch target like this would have been eminently possible in the past for Vinod Ramnani, 56, the reticent co-founder and CMD of Opto Circuits.
After a modest IPO in 2000 for the company he started in 1992, Ramnani spent the next 10 years slowly but surely taking it from being an OEM supplier of pulse oximeters – external medical devices that measure oxygen levels in the blood – to a major player with international interests. Since 2001, Ramnani started acquiring companies, starting small and in India, before acquiring those in Europe and the US for much larger sums. By 2010, he turned the Bangalore-headquartered Opto Circuits into a fairly formidable healthcare products company on the back of 10 acquisitions.
Meanwhile, India served as the base for low-cost manufacturing and access to capital. To keep investors happy, Ramnani announced bonus share offers almost every year. For instance, a single Opto Circuits share from 2002 would be 17 today.
He also returned to the same investors much of the cash generated from his operations every year as dividend. The amounts weren’t small, with payouts ranging from 30-40%. It is only in recent years that it came down, falling to 14.9% in 2012. “We have stopped looking at acquisitions. We have to digest the ones we’ve already done,” said Ramnani. The next phase of Opto Circuits’ growth will have to come from within, organically. With further debt and acquisitions off the table for the next couple of years, Ramnani is adopting a dual-pronged strategy of organic growth and cost-cutting to remain in the good books of his investors. “We want each of our group companies to introduce at least one new product every year,” says Jayesh Patel, co-founder and promoter.
