Will Shashi Kiran Shetty's New Business Bets Pay Off?

By helping connect the different stakeholders of global trade, Shashi Kiran Shetty has built a decent logistics business. But as his company, Allcargo, faces challenges, will new business bets pay off?

- Aveek Datta

In 2014, Shashi Kiran Shetty, a Mumbai-based entrepreneur who had kept a low profile hitherto, suddenly shot into the limelight. He had inked a landmark deal for a prime piece of real estate in Mumbai’s tony suburb of Bandra. It wasn’t just any house he had bought. ‘Aashirwaad’, the sea-facing bungalow on Carter Road that he had acquired for a reported 85 crore, was home to Bollywood superstar Rajesh Khanna for over four decades. The property deal made Shetty the talk of the town because of its iconic previous owner, who came to Mumbai from Punjab in the 1960s and ruled tinsel town for years. Similarly, it was also symbolic of the success Shetty had achieved as a first-generation entrepreneur who came to Mumbai from Mangaluru in 1978 in search of a job, and went on build a company with a top line of 6,088 crore in 2017-18.

Shetty, 62, is the chairman of Allcargo Logistics, an integrated logistics company present across multiple business lines globally. These include multimodal transport operations (MTO), through which Allcargo acts as an intermediary between customers who want to move their cargo, and shipping lines through less-than container load (LCL) consolidation and full container load (FCL) forwarding; container freight station (CFS) operations that handle the import and export of cargo from Indian ports including Customs clearance, warehousing, and related ancillary logistics services; project engineering and services (PES) that offer transportation of over-dimensional and overweight cargo and equipment leasing for onsite lifting and shifting of heavy goods involved in the development of infrastructure projects; and third-party logistics services under which Allcargo manages the supply chains of other companies under contract.