"Piracy?... Ji, hamare business mein
to yen sab chalta hain"
Gulshan can afford to sleep. This year, his group will declare
a turnover of Rs 2.5 billion. And that is the white component. Everybody
in the music business believes that Gulshan makes his big bucks
from piracy -- from running off low-cost copies of other people's
soundtracks -- and that these cash earnings are used to fund the
movie ventures. Gulshan denies this and looks bemused when you
try to probe.
"Piracy?" he says. " Aisi to koi baat hi nahin hain."
Then, deciding that he's straining credulity with the blanket
denial, he makes a tiny concession: "Ji, hamare business mein
to yen sab chalta hain." But that's it. Ask him more on the
subject and he will pretend he hasn't understood the question.
Nor is his empire easy to assess. So great is his passion for
business confidentiality that there are at least 15 companies
in his group. Some are sole proprietorships, others are partnerships
and a few are private limited companies. Gulshan is unwilling
to provide figures for any of them.
That leaves Super Cassettes, his flagship company, as the only
operation that is subject to some kind of scrutiny. The group
guards of the Super Cassettes balance sheet as zealously as music
directors guard their copyrights when Gulshan is around. But it
seems clear that Super Cassettes shows a turnover of Rs 1.5 billion.
According to Gulshan, this gives him a 65-per-cent share of the
audio cassette market, a claim that may well be justified if you
include piracy, but which is hard to sustain on the basis of the
stated turnover. But then Gulshan likes overkill. Super Cassettes
calls itself 'The Largest Music Company In Asia'. A claim that
is certain to cause some surprise at Japan's CBS/Sony.
Nevertheless, a Rs 1.5 billion turnover is impressive when you consider
that the unit price of his cassettes can be as low as Rs 16. You
have to sell an awful lot of cassettes to reach that kind of turnover.
Gulshan Kumar now wants to repeat his success in audio with video.
He claims a 33 percent share of the pre-recorded video cassette
market, a figure that is impossible to verify because of the unorganised
nature of the sector. His figure for video cassette revenue is 150 million.
Another Rs 100 million in turnover comes from the CD division, which
sell at an amazing Rs 120 per unit compared to the market average
of Rs 500 plus. He believes, with some justification, that the
CD market in India could experience a huge boom if cheap hardware
were able to match his cheap software.
Accordingly, his music system division (which he also claims has
revenues of Rs 100 million) will soon introduce a CD player for a mere
Rs 3,250. If quality holds up, then he could be the
pioneer of another boom.
Gulshan has also diversified into other areas. He owns a soap
and detergents factory in NOIDA and claims a turnover of Rs 350 million. The consumer electronics division makes television sets and he says that revenues are Rs 400 million.
All this adds up to Rs 2.5 billion and even if the market share
figures are exaggerated, there is little doubt that he is now the
head of a medium-sized industrial group. As most of the manufacturing
capacity was set up in 1988, this represents an unusually high
rate of growth over seven years.
One of the more unusual aspects of the Gulshan Kumar success story
is that while the world perceives him as a bright young man who
broke out of the restrictions imposed by his parents circumstances,
one man refuses to buy this characterisation. And oddly enough,
that man is Gulshan's father.
Chandra Bhan Dua is now 71, but whereas Gulshan tries hard to
seem elusive, the old man is eager to talk. "I set up this company,"
he says. "Even Anuradha Paudwal was my discovery. Her first recording
for T-Series was the Durga Saptarshi and I had it released at
a Hindu function in Nepal." This does not accord with the
gospel according to Gulshan where our hero is portrayed as the
sole mover and shaker in the family.
And perhaps, Chandra Bhan is exaggerating. What is true is that
it is due to his efforts that the family, which came over in 1947
from Jhang in West Punjab with virtually no money, achieved a
degree of financial stability. Chandra Bhan started small, selling
fruit on the road. In a few years, he had earned enough to establish
a fruit juice shop and it was his idea to move into pre-recorded
music by opening a record shop in Gulmohar Park.
Gulshan's role in this part of the Dua saga is minimal. He did
a BA pass course from Delhi's Deshbandhu college, but spent most
of his time watching Hindi movies ("I was film crazy")
and acting in college plays. He did help out in the fruit juice
business, but he was never an integral part of it. By the time
he left college and was ready to earn his living, Chandra Bhan
had already made the shift to recorded music. After that, of course,
Gulshan took over and built up the Super Cassettes empire.
His early success were assisted by the stupidity of the Gramophone
Company of India, then India's largest record company. At a time
when the whole of India was shifting to cassettes, the Gramophone
Company persisted with records on its HMV label. It did not have
sufficient capacity to make enough cassettes and those that it
did market were expensive.
The company's lack of market savvy left the field open for bootleggers
who would make pirate copies of HMV's cassettes. Because the bootleggers
paid no royalties and no excise and used cheap cassettes, they
were able to sell their products at half of the Gramophone Company's
prices.
It is widely believed that Gulshan Kumar made his first fortune
in the pirate cassette market. He joined the cassette industry
in 1978 and within two years, the bootleggers had come to dominate
the business. The legitimate music industry said he was the king
of the pirates, an allegation that Gulshan either denies or pretends
not to have heard each time it is made.
If he was a pirate, however, then he was smarter than the rest
because he recognised that it was only a matter of time before
the legitimate music industry lowered prices and increased production.
He was right, but by the time that R P Goenka took over the Gramophone
Company and re-oriented its policies, Gulshan had himself crossed
over to join the legitimate industry with his T series brand of
cassettes.
Even as a "legitimate business", he was controversial. To the horror
of other music companies, he began the trend of cover versions.
Initially, this was fair enough: he would get some unknown to
re-record old Kishore Kumar songs and sell them cheap. But then,
Gulshan got more ambitious. He began to flog cover versions of
current movies. The cassettes always made it clear in the small
print that these were not the original recordings but the consumers
were not always literary-minded enough to read all the small print.
The issue blew up when he did his own version of the best-selling
Hum Aapke Hain Koun...! soundtrack.
Cleverly, he put a picture of Salman Khan and Madhuri Dixit (but
from another film) on the jacket and a casual observer could well
be fooled into believing that he was buying the original. An outraged
Gramophone Company sued and the battle has see-sawed before the
courts.
The music companies say that even if they can stop Gulshan from
producing his cover versions, it is virtually impossible to stop
the pirate recordings -- that is, bootlegged cassettes that claim
to be the original but whose revenues never reach the copyright
holders. Gulshan, of course, says that he knows nothing about piracy.
Kind courtesy: Sunday magazine
Gulshan! continued
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