How to make a billion

Gopiraj KV's leadership of ZAFCO is entering a critical phrase as the tyre company moves from taking stock to a potential stock floatation. PMV learns

Gopiraj KV’s leadership of ZAFCO is entering a critical phrase as the tyre company moves from taking stock to a potential stock floatation. PMV learns about running one of the GCC’s biggest aftermarket operations and his plans to take the company from being a local player to a global enterprise

Gopiraj has just returned from an excursion in India where he outlined plans to open 84 trucking centres across its northern and western territories.

He also reveals that the company will go public and expand by four times and reach $1 billion in sales by 2013.

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A graduate of the FMCG school of understanding the market and the power of branding, ZAFCO is affording Gopiraj the opportunity to put everything he has learned into place.

He wants to lead a global enterprise and to realise his ambition of breaking into the big league of tyre distributors such as the $3 billion industry-leading America Tire Distributors.

“You’ll have to ask the board whether they chose me because of my history in FMCG or not but I was personally very excited to join a company with ambitions of going public within three years and reaching $1 billion in sales.”

He believes that there are quite a few things he can apply from what he has learned but not everything fits neatly into the world of tyres.

Citing the chief of his North American operation, a fellow FMCG graduate, as an example, he believes the company benefits from its policy of looking beyond the autotrade for its talent.

“You know, if you’re a $350 million company buy you want to become a $1 billion operation then you have to do things differently. Sometimes need to be willing to work backwards to work out the ways of getting there,” he comments.

“I think we do things differently because we’ve been able to bring in people from a lots of different backgrounds.

“People often come in and try to modify their experience to make it apply. When they understand our philosophy too, that’s when we can drive sales.”

While it prepares for flotation, ZAFCO has been recording annual growth rates of 30% and, as it expands beyond the environs of Dubai, it is learning the value of keeping a flexible attitude to the many markets it now serves.

“We used to treat Saudi Arabia as an export market; simply selling and invoicing. But we set up an operation there and brought people in,” he explains. “By 2012, we could be a $60-70 million company there but by 2013 we could reach $100 million in turnover – suddenly being a billion dollar company seems nearer.”

Being bigger in Saudi, will not be enough by itself, and he has identified ten major markets for that ZAFCO will focus on in the next few years. The trip to India, where he found himself attracting national newspaper attention, has only served to galvanise his opinion that it deserves to be high up the list.