The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh News : Buying companies and turning them round is her forte

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Monday, Aug 30, 2010
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Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh

Buying companies and turning them round is her forte

Vinodka Murria

She does the buying, merging and selling of business entities as effortlessly as she sips a cup of coffee. In that she has excelled for the past 20 years, getting her feet firm on the ground that smells typically male.

Vinodka Murria aka Vin, the tough Asian entrepreneur of the American and British financial sectors, has been the recipient of ‘Asian Businesswoman of the year' award for 2010, and the ‘Asian Woman of Achievement' award for 2009. Her achievement of consolidating loss-making businesses and selling them in fat deals has held many mouths agape.

The effervescent ‘Vin' breezed into the city in her capacity as the Non-Executive Director of the Greenko Group campaigning for green energy technologies. One finds it heartening to know that she is a ‘Punjabi kudi' born with no silver spoons in her mouth, and yet made it all on her own.

“Commitment by family” is what she attributes her success to. Her father was from Delhi, and mother from Jalandhar, and they migrated to United Kingdom when Vin, the eldest among five children, was three-years-old. Hailing from a humble background, her father worked as a bus driver while mother set up a corner shop in Coventry.

“Our parents absolutely believed in education and wanted us to succeed,” she says, and remembers that it was her mother and uncle who made her higher education happen. Both opposed her father's wish to get her married young, enabling Vin to pursue her undergraduation in Computing Science and Masters in Business Administration.

In her very first job in Kewill Systems, Vin was recognised for her exceptional talent and at 23, she was already handling the job of turning round the newly acquired Triffid Software. Since then, there was no looking back. Buying companies and turning them round has become her forte. During her 15 years with Kewill Systems, she fixed 16 loss-making businesses.

The world sat up and took notice when she, as the head of the Computer Software Group, effected 17 acquisitions and rolled them together to sell at an impressive £500-million—all within a time-span of four-and-a-half years.

Now as the CEO of Advanced Computer Software, she has been the sole force behind bringing the company to its present evaluation of $350-million. Despite her phenomenal success, Vin believes glass ceiling does exist in financial sector.

“Look at the volume of women coming out of the colleges and universities and compare them with the number running corporate businesses. Often, the issue is that women don't think they can do it. We grow up thinking that our role is behind the kitchen sink,” she laments.

Opportunities are great for people, whether male or female, who choose to become entrepreneurs, she says.

Married to Sunil Bhalla, a mathematician, who she faced with a list of “what she wouldn't do” including cooking, cleaning, washing and the like! It was with encouragement from him that she began a foundation to help poor children's education in India.

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