Bajaj Electricals: a family firm handed a professional the wheel and went net-debt free

In 2018 Bajaj Electricals, the oldest company in the Bajaj group, lost its managing director Anant Bajaj to a sudden cardiac arrest at 41. Beneath the loss sat rot: the EPC engineering business booked paper profits but was a sinkhole for cash, debt was mounting, and the appliances business was being beaten by competitors. Chairman Shekhar Bajaj zeroed in on Anuj Poddar, an independent director on the board, and had him vetted by patriarch Rahul Bajaj and Rajiv Bajaj before making him the first professional ever to run the company, as executive director, in late 2018.

Poddar threw out his prepared presentation and split the job into three: firefighting, a new business model, and fixing the organisation. The EPC arm stopped taking new orders to stem the burn and later accepted only projects with significant profit, because, as he put it, topline in that business is vanity. The consumer business was rebuilt around quality, reduced Chinese imports and a 15-year Morphy Richards brand agreement. The hierarchy was flattened from 17 levels to 12, half the leadership team was replaced, and a first-name, anonymous-townhall culture replaced the old deference.

The discipline worked: the EPC business became debt-free on its own, and in February 2022 the company announced its demerger into a separately listed entity, Bajel Projects. By March 31, 2022, Bajaj Electricals was net-debt free for the first time in four decades, and its market capitalisation had risen from Rs 5,756 crore in 2018 to about Rs 13,000 crore.

Net-debt free by March 2022 for the first time in four decades; market cap up from Rs 5,756 crore in 2018 to about Rs 13,000 crore by 2022.

The family chose competence over lineage at the moment of crisis, handing the group's oldest company to its first professional leader.

Refusing vanity EPC orders traded revenue for cash, which is what a debt-laden company actually needs.

Cultural surgery, a flatter hierarchy and a changed leadership team, made the new strategy executable inside an eighty-year-old bureaucracy.

Demerging the EPC arm let each business be funded and judged on its own economics.

Family continuity and professional control are not opposites. Picking an outsider early and backing him with authority saved value that dynastic autopilot was quietly burning.

The EPC business was separated into Bajel Projects, and the consumer company kept compounding on brand. In September 2025 Bajaj Electricals agreed to buy the Morphy Richards brand and related intellectual property for India, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, the Maldives and Sri Lanka from Glen Electric, part of Ireland's Glen Dimplex Group, for Rs 146 crore, converting a partnership it had run since April 2002 into full ownership of a premium brand; the shares rallied 8% on the announcement.