Solutions In A Box

As entrepreneur, philanthropist, culture aficionado and Honorary Consul of the Kingdom of Morocco, Kailash Kumar Kanoria’s responsibilities go beyond overseeing Mumbai-based TCPL Packaging Limited, of which he is the founder and executive chairman. But considering his advanced age, he does it all with surprising agility and finesse.

- Joseph Rozario

Kailash Kumar Kanoria counts among those Marwari businessmen who have carved their destinies through personal initiative and inner drive. As scion of an illustrious business family from Calcutta (now Kolkata), he started his entrepreneurial journey by taking the traditional route of training in the family businesses, but fate changed the course of his life and took him to Bombay (now Mumbai) instead, where he built his packaging business from scratch. Having grown from strength to strength ever since, his company, TCPL Packaging Limited, now is a market leader in the packaging business.

An illustrious background

The Kanorias’ business interests ranged from tea, sugar and textiles to cement and chemicals. Kailash Kanoria started off by looking after the tea business, which took him to Assam. From there he moved on to Uttar Pradesh to look after the family’s sugar mills, and later, around 1984, he was assigned the task of looking after the family’s textile mills in Ahmedabad. In 1994, Kailash Kanoria’s father, Radha Kissen Kanoria, passed away, and thereafter he spent most of his time in Ahmedabad. With time, the Kanorias separated, and this put Kailash Kanoria at the helm of the family’s textile mills in Ahmedabad. And then, when he was looking to enhance the business, circumstances plaguing the already beleaguered textile industry forced him to think otherwise.

A new start

“In the '80s and '90s, the textile industry ran into a crisis. When matters came to a head, I shifted to Bombay, where we diversified into printing and packaging in 1989. It was an absolutely new business for us and so I had to start from the grass-roots,” says Kanoria. Then known as Twenty-First Century Printers Ltd, Kanoria’s business was headquartered in Bombay, while the factory was in Silvassa.

Growth and consolidation