I’d like to inform you that in February 2015 when I joined the Shipping Corporation of India, I joined the company in the capacity of Director Finance.
So being at the helm of the affairs, actually leading the company from the front has
been only about two years back. In September 2019, I was assigned the charge of chairperson and managing director of Shipping Corporation of India.
So from 2019 onwards, I was driving the company but from 2015 to 2019 my job was limited to the Director Finance role. But that actually helped in building, strengthening, and preparing me
for the ultimate job at the top because eventually, it’s always the financial help and the commercial well-being of an entity that leads to its sustainability.
We’ve been seeing this in ’n’ number of companies that a lot of the good
companies sometimes go into liquidation or bankruptcy simply because there have been some
financial problems with them. I think I got a fantastic opportunity
when I joined the company in 2015 to financially turn around the company. From 2010-2011
onwards, the company had been reporting financial losses for 3 consecutive years when I joined in
2015 but after that, the company had a financial turnaround
basically looked into a lot of fundamentals with respect to financial management, processes,
systems, high levels of corporate governance, transparency and devised new systems so that you
could have corporate government transparency and complete system and that always helps to strengthen
the basic fundamentals of a company.
Incidentally during that
time, the company went through a lot of changes in terms of demonetization. The GST came in,
and there were new accounting standards. Earlier we were following
the gap.
This was basically a phase of financial confirmation both outside as well as inside since
what was happening outside was to impact the company inside as well. There was a lot of churning going
on inside the company and that really helps the company to become financially robust.
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