Crown Worldwide Group, founded in 1965 and headquartered in Hong Kong, is a global company dedicated to simplifying international living and business. Its range of services include moving and relocation, workspace management, storage of fine art, and more. Based in Mumbai, Srinivas Krishnan, MD, South Asia, oversees Crown’s operations in India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. Since joining Crown in 1997 as Financial Controller, Indonesia, Krishnan has driven business turnarounds and strategic initiatives. The key clients in India range from BFSI and FMCG to automobile, IT services, manufacturing, energy, hotels and healthcare, firms who believe in Crown to ABDOV (‘always deliver outrageous value’) till the LM (‘last mile’). In an interview with Lancelot Joseph, he explains about potential areas of growth for the company. Excerpts:
What are the key growth drivers in India?
Crown Worldwide Group’s India entity was incorporated in 1996 with operations starting from 1998. The management and staff members have been the main growth drivers with heavy investment made in intangibles like training to build their skills and capabilities and in tangible structures like state-of-the-art facilities plus operations set up over more than dozen locations balanced all across India. The tactile culture of commitment to give their best, irrespective of the designation, location and situation to maintain the quality, as intended by our founder & chairman, Jim Thompson, at any cost has witnessed many of the team members completing its tenure of decade plus in this great operation. Further, the team is totally driven by self-sustenance; hence, productivity and healthy bottom line has been a significant part of our achievements.
What are the key milestones achieved?
We have made history in the group through several milestones. To name a few, from being a servicing office for other countries of the group till the instant of subprime crises, our Indian team has been able to create market space by organically diversifying into locally driven domestic contracts for relocation and records management by finding lucrative niches. To date, we hold the record for the largest outbound shipment, ever contracted for an Indian conglomerate, in the group and, that too, with a seamless service level ably credited by the client. To rapidly spread the inevitable digital culture with the mantra, digitise or die, we have formed an DTA (Digital Transformation Academy) to prepare all the team members for the upcoming future. This idea has been adopted by other regions in the group as well. We are probably the only company in our industry who did not lay off any of our staff during pandemic and honored all our stakeholder commitment like a conscious corporate citizen.
What are the potential areas of growth and expansion in India?
It is said ‘riches are in the niches’. We are operating in the niche sector of logistics like relocations, fine art, mobility, records management, digital services, work and warehouse space management. Domestic market for moving services has been mapped as a major driver for business in India. Fine art business, catering to private art collections and investors, local art companies, auction houses, national galleries and museums, offers a major source of business in the years to come. Growing awareness of immigration fuels the mobility business. As a second leg for a number of MNCs other than China, India is fast becoming a destination hub, offering scope in realty business. The records archival business has grown organically yet exponentially against all odds and the India operation is leading the group in terms of volume growth as of date. Sensing the maturity of paper records early, Indian team is leading the digital growth story and proudly shares its talent base and know-how with other group.
What have been the kind of investments so far in India?
While size is no recipe for the rate of success, the group has invested more than Rs500 crore ($60 million) to date in capex and are looking to invest further Rs500 crore to build world class facilities to accommodate the growing market needs for premium services.
Any new services introduced in India?
In the digital arena, by closely connecting with our loyal client base, we have devised customised solutions like source code escrow, development of unified information management platform. Some are new to the Indian market, and some are new to the global market, plus our team have made inroads quite successfully through resilient and soulful service irrespective of the challenges like pandemic, demonetisation, devaluation, etc.