8 April 2010

BDA Senior Managing Director Euan Rellie presenting at the Indian Business Conference at Columbia Business School

April 8, 2010

http://www0.gsb.columbia.edu/students/organizations/saba/conferences/2008/index.html

Columbia Business School in association with the South Asian Business Association (SABA) is pleased to announce the 5th Annual India Business Conference, a premier forum for professionals, businesses, academicians, students and thinkers to explore and discuss the key business challenges and opportunities in India with esteemed speakers from industry, distinguished Columbia University faculty and like-minded professionals.

India: Rising to the Challenge

Over the past few months, India has seen three big events that will go down in its history: the November 26, 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai, the Satyam accounting scandal and the success of Slumdog Millionaire.

All this has happened in the midst of one of the biggest economic crisis the world has seen. As the world comes to grip with the reality of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and as any remaining notion of de-coupling begins to melt away, the emerging world, and particularly its leaders China and India, will be increasingly looked at to provide sustained consumer driven growth.

From India’s perspective there are significant hurdles that need to be overcome, but if and when they are, the world can count on consumer driven growth the likes of which the world has not seen since the post Second World War boom in the United States, Western Europe & Japan. In order to become a global power of the future, India will have to introspectively look at its past and its systems to figure out how it can evolve so that it can continue to build the momentum of the past few years.

This India Business Conference at ColumbiaBusinessSchool will focus not so much on India’s successes, but on the key business challenges that need to be overcome to produce sustained consumer driven growth in India, and the potential opportunities for those involved.

Indian Capital Markets: Delivering through De-levering
Speakers: Euan Rellie, Anil Kumar, Inder Soni and Ashish Chugh
Panel Moderator: Prof. Partha Mohanram
Panel Co-ordinators: Rajeet Chatterjee, Pratibha Vuppuluri and Sunil Parthasarathy

2008 lay bare the decoupling fallacy – but with Indian GDP still growing at a healthy, albeit slower clip of 7.1%, what are the challenges and opportunities in the Indian capital markets amidst of one of the biggest global economic challenges in half a century? Can the Indian markets rescue the global investor? How are regulatory frameworks affecting distressed investing in India? Come, listen and debate the storied players in these markets as they share their experiences and perspectives on what lies ahead.

Euan Rellie
Founder and Sr. Managing Director, Business Development Asia LLC

Euan Rellie is joint founder and Senior Managing Director and is based in New York. Since founding BDA in 1996, Mr. Rellie has been based in Singapore, New York and London and has worked across China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, India and the Middle East. From 1990 to 1996 he worked in the Corporate Finance Department of Schroders, the leading UK investment bank now part of Citigroup, and was based in New York, London and Singapore. For most of this period, Mr. Rellie worked on behalf of Western multinationals, assisting them in their international development.

In 1995 and 1996, he was Head of SE Asia Execution for Schroders’ Asia-Pacific Regional Advisory Group. Mr. Rellie’s clients in Asia have included BUPA, DuPont, Hanjin, ICI, Intel, Kraft Foods, Lubrizol, Nalco, Philip Morris, Reuters, Rohm and Haas, Sara Lee and Tenneco. He was educated at EtonCollege and CambridgeUniversity (BA Hons, History) and is a Corporate Finance Specialist Registered Representative.

Anil Kumar
Managing Director, Virtus Global

Anil Kumar is the Founder and Managing Director of Virtus Global Partners. Mr. Kumar brings over 14 years of experience advising mid to large size companies with their growth and investment strategy. He specializes in cross border mergers and acquisition advisory, investment banking and management consulting.

Mr. Kumar’s representative experience at Virtus Global Partners include: leading the purchase of Samuels Jewelers on behalf of Gitanjali Gems, debt financing for Ultra Stores, sale of Front Office Technologies to Glodyne, India entry strategy for Jean Claude Biguine and fund advisory for 13i Capital. He has participated in several other cross border transactions between US and India in the retail, technology and auto-components sector.

Prior to Virtus Global Partners, Mr. Kumar was a Director with Alvarez & Marsal LLC, where he implemented financial and operational restructuring services for energy and textile clients such as NEGT and Warnaco. Before this, he was a Senior Manager with KPMG Consulting where he led merger integration engagements for media and finance companies including Bertelsmann, Sony, AOL and Time Warner.

Mr. Kumar holds an MBA in Finance from ColumbiaBusinessSchool and a BE from the Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, India.

Inder Soni
Principal & Senior Analyst, Porter Orlin LLC

Porter Orlin is a global value-oriented long/short equity fund. Inder joined Porter Orlin in 2004 from The Chatterjee Group, a former Soros affiliate where he focused on India related investments. Prior to TCG, he was with ZSC a venture capital firm and with McKinsey and Company in its New York Office. Inder began his career with Exabyte, a data storage provider to IBM, Hewlett Packard, and Sun Microsystems. He holds a BS and MS degree in Engineering from The University of Michigan, and an MBA with Beta Gamma Sigma honors, from ColumbiaBusinessSchool. He was born in India and graduated from high school in Thailand.

Ashish Chugh
Investment Professional, Bay Pond Hedge Fund

Ashish Chugh is an investment professional at Bay Pond Partners, a $1.5B hedge fund within the Wellington Management Company, a Boston based investment management firm with over $400B of capital under management. Prior to Wellington, Ashish worked as an Associate at the Blue Chip Venture Company, a venture capital/private equity firm. Before business school, Ashish worked as an engineer at IBM in Toronto and Hitachi in Tokyo. Ashish has an MBA from HarvardBusinessSchool and a Bachelors of Applied Sciences in Electrical Engineering from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

Prof. Partha Mohanram
Philip H. Geier Jr. Associate Professor of Business, Columbia Business School

Professor Mohanram’s research has been published in the leading academic journals including the Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting and Economics and the Review of Accounting Studies . His research focuses on the valuation of stocks, corporate disclosure and earnings management. His research has examined the valuation of Internet stocks, the calculation of cost of capital, the use of fundamental information in the valuation of growth stocks and the manipulation of earnings to maximize executive compensation. He has also studied the impact of Regulation Fair Disclosure (FD) on the functioning of financial analysts. His research has been cited often in the business press and he has appeared on CNBC to discuss his research on growth stocks. He serves on the editorial board of the Accounting Review . Mohanram teaches financial statement analysis to MBAs and executive MBAs, with an emphasis on exposing students to the potential manipulations of financial statements. He also teaches in Columbia’s executive education programs. He is currently the coordinator of doctoral program for the accounting group, and has served on the dissertation committees of several students.

Latest news