There’s a lot to digest when one lunches with 46-year-old Mithun Sacheti. One, mostly there’s the lunch itself, a simple and delicious home-cooked meal, and the other is the number of exceptional business ideas he serves up on your plate. Forget a restaurant, let’s meet in my office for a meal and conversation, says Sacheti.
Office is just off raucous and bustling Mount Road in Chennai, in a fairly new building he jointly owns, and where watches to jewellery firm, Titan Co. Ltd and CaratLane, the online jewellery firm he founded and eventually sold to Titan, are also housed.
Sacheti shot into the limelight in August 2023 when Titan bought out his and family’s remaining stake of 27.18 per cent in CaratLane for a whopping Rs 4,621 crore. Since then, Sacheti has been investing in a variety of high growth companies, taking time to understand the business and participate in their growth stories.
Sacheti’s office is an open plan expanse with low slung comfortable chairs, table and benches for dining, or a meeting; and a cable machine for weight training in the far end. Another wing of this office is workspaces where Sacheti’s team, mostly comprising lawyers, work.
A glass partitioned room to the right with a large screen is where he takes online calls. Surprisingly, the 46-year-old, 6 ft1” Sacheti, usually casually dressed in T-shirts, jeans and sneakers, does not use a laptop but works mostly on his phone. And, for a jeweller, he’s bereft of any jewellery; nor does he wear watches, despite running a 15 store, multi-city Swiss luxury watch business, Art of Time.
After a brief conversation, Sacheti invites Raghuvir Srinivasan, businessline Editor and me, to lunch, which has come from his home in various steel dabbas. Chappatis, a dal, baingan bartha, kofta in gravy, rice and curd. And a besan laddu for dessert.
We comment that the food is delicious. “Will tell my wife this,” he says, with a broad grin. Sacheti’s wife, Anjali, is from New York; they met at a trade show in the US and, as he says, the families too knew each other. We ask him if she made the transition to Chennai well. “These days we are the ones pitching Chennai to everyone; this is home,” he says emphatically. He himself relocated to Chennai in 2001 to start a branch of the family’s Jaipur Gems business.
Participating in growth stories
Sacheti’s CaratLane journey and eventual sale to Titan Co is well catalogued, so we ask how he’s investing the money he got from the blockbuster deal. It’s a variety of businesses he’s invested in, but he makes it clear that wherever he’s putting his money, he wants to be a part of that journey.
“Even if I have a small stake, I would rather invest in those companies where I get to build something and participate in their growth story and thought process. If I don’t get that, it doesn’t give me any satisfaction.”
One of the ventures he’s a co-founder in is Oro, a locker business where, with Federal Bank, it has loaned out Rs 1,000 crore so far. The firm has around 800 lockers and the firm has reimagined the pawn broking business. Patrons get to use the lockers where their gold is bar coded and then get a line of credit against that gold from Oro. The firm recently got an NBFC licence as well.
Of the Oro business as a new idea, Sacheti says, “I don’t want to do a business in which I’m not adding anything new or if I’m not building a sunrise sector. That doesn’t excite me at all to personally be involved.”
We are done with lunch and dessert of a laddu each and move to Sacheti’s conference room, which doubles up as his office as well. Over steaming cups of coffee, he tells us that he’s also invested as a co-sponsor in Singularity AMC, which provides private equity to growth stage companies. The fund has raised Rs 2,000 crore and invested ₹800 crore across six companies.
Another interesting company that Sacheti has invested in is Qusev, which expands as Quest for Clean Energy Vehicles where he has collaborated with two others, NK Raval and Madhu Kela. Sacheti points out that Raval, a former MD of Olectra, says that most have got the EV paradigm wrong.
“EV is all about product efficiency. Making an EV commercial car is of no use as it doesn’t run enough.” Qusev, which has an alliance with Chinese EV maker BYD, for its CKD (completely knocked down) kits and batteries, plans to roll out tipper lorries, refrigerated vans, cement mixers and such like, which are run for a good deal of time.
Handling the ‘nightmare’ part
There are other businesses where he is leveraging the infrastructure he is putting up – one is a data centre in TN, where he is putting up the physical infrastructure, including power and telecom links and the data centre can be put up by others. Similar is the solar park he’s planning under Vembur Power Corporation, that he’s promoted, in Tuticorin, where’s he’s acquired the land.
“If you breakdown solar’s internal rate of return (IRR), there are three things that happen. One, you need evacuation and transmission to the state. The second thing that you require is land aggregations which can be a nightmare. So, we are doing the nightmare part of it. It will take one to two years, and we are almost 80 per cent of it there. We have enough evacuation now for 500 megawatts. We have to make that evacuation happen for at least 1,000 to 2,000 megawatts. And the third part is the panels themselves. From a technology perspective, the only thing that keeps changing is the panel prices and the risk is all in the panel,” he explains.
So, once he’s done with the most painful part, other investors can put up the panels and pay Vembur Power the rent. “If the IRR in solar is 14 to 16 per cent if I remove the panel the IRR goes to 20 per cent and the capital deployment also goes down and risk goes to almost zero.”
There are other businesses Sacheti has invested in – one is, of course, his first love: diamond jewellery, where he has a robust B2B business.
“We need to improve the quality of jewellery sold in India. I feel that we are way behind China. We are way behind many others in Europe. The way to solve that is not by becoming the brand that sells it, but by improving the quality of B2B product itself,” he says. The other is a Swiss luxury watch business, Art of Time, with one planned in Chennai soon.
We ask Sacheti how he manages these multifarious businesses. “I find somebody who’s smarter than me to run what I’m doing,” he says. “That’s tough,” we say, to which he laughs heartily. “I have learned that the guy who’s today in his 20s is certainly more exposed than I am to the world. His ability to see things is much more. If it’s a consumer business, I want to find somebody who has better consumer insighting than me. My capital is available to invest in those businesses. And the second thing I offer is experience. My greed is that I will learn from people who are masters in that art. So, they are the king of one and I can be the Jack of all,” he explains, with a broad grin.
We ask Sacheti about his hobbies. He plays a lot of badminton and loves to watch live sports, cricket to football. And he loves the sea as well, the tranquility of the ceaseless waves. “I find it therapeutic,” he adds. And, of course, family time, with wife Anjali and school-going children, daughter Mira and son Raghav.
Sacheti says his philosophy in business has been shaped by what his one-time promoter in CaratLane, Srinivasa Gopalan told him: “Obstacles do not block the path, they are the path!” And, of course, he says, “You need tenacity and luck in business. And the third is obsession.” For Sacheti, his businesses are a magnificent obsession.