GETTING OFF THE flight at Changsha Huanghua International Airport in early 2007 was an experience for Vineet Agrawal. The CEO of Wipro Consumer Care & Lighting had gone to China with his A-team to close the buyout of Unza Holdings, a manufacturer of personal care products with plants across China and Southeast Asia. It was Agrawal’s first touchdown at Changsha, one of the world’s busiest airports, and he remembers it vividly: clad in a business suit, he felt out of place among the locals wearing Bermuda shorts.
Agrawal could not locate anyone who spoke English. No interpreter either. Hailing a taxi, he showed the driver a slip of paper with his destination’s address in Chinese. The driver stared at it blankly. Things looked ominous. “Unza,” Agrawal said. The cabbie’s face lit up, and he gestured to Agrawal’s party to hop in. “We figured it was a good company since the driver knew it. That was a small thing, but it mattered,” he recalls.
Wipro Consumer Care & Lighting, a division of Wipro Enterprises, was new to the foreign buyouts game. But the noughties was when Wipro’s competitors, such as Godrej and Marico, were picking up companies abroad. For Wipro Consumer, then a ₹ 600-crore entity, Unza would be the first. By early June that year, Unza was in the bag for $246 million (then ₹1,010 crore).
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