Sudhir Hasija-The Upwardly Mobile Entrepreneur
June 26, 2011 24 Comments
Sudhir Hasija is the chairman of the Rs 1200 crore homegrown handset maker Karbonn Mobiles.Here is a link to the company’s website:http://www.karbonnmobiles.com/.
His story will tell you how a person with few means can get into wholesaling and then into manufacturing.So for all would- be industrialists here is his story:
55 year old Sudhir Hasija, is the son of a government clerk. He left his home in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, after clearing his Class 10 exams. He then moved to Hyderabad where he spent three years in a machine tools company and saved around Rs 3,000. He used this money to set up a business selling TV accessories such as antennas and trolleys in Chennai. It was a difficult struggle. He would climb to the rooftops of buildings bare footed in the scorching heat to install antennas. He used to wash at railway stations and stay in low-cost lodges. However he persisted and managed to built a thriving business that he expanded across other southern cities. Read more of this post
This article was published in today’s Mumbai Mirror.Reading it took me back to another time when India was a very different place.I was then still in school.India was anything but shining.Poverty and shortages were so much a fact of life that few of us really had an idea of how poor we were since everyone around us was in the same situation and most people had very little exposure to what was going on in the rest of the world.There was no talk of India being an emerging/emerged nation.We considered ourselves as belonging strictly to the Third World and few asked why we should not want better for ourselves.Read the article below and if you’re Indian take a minute to pat yourself on the back for how far we have come in 2 decades.Take heart from it and know that we have it in us to overcome out present problems.And remember the story so that we are never again in the same situation. 
Sir John Templeton (November 29, 1912 – July 8, 2008) was a legendary investor and a pioneer of global investing. He took value investing to an extreme, picking industries and companies he believed to be at rock bottom, or as he called it “points of maximum pessimism.”He bought when there was blood on the streets. For example,when investors fled the New York market after the Second World War was declared, Templeton borrowed $10,000 to scoop up stocks priced at less than a dollar, often in companies that were near bankruptcy. In four years, he sold the stock, paid off the debt and pocketed $40,000—the seed money for Templeton Growth Fund, a market beater for many years.
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