S N Ladhani: India’s Largest Independent Coca-Cola Bottler And Champion Of Nature Conservation

Meet Sachanand Ladhani, 80, for the answer to such questions. The Sindhi businessman has an uncanny sense of where to park his money and an angel investor mindset.

The latest venture of Ladhani, 80, is SLMG Beverages, which he incorporated in 2019 to combine the Coca-Cola bottlers run by his brothers in Uttar Pradesh.

SLMG has become India’s largest bottler for Coca-Cola, with 20% of its market, and accounts for Rs 5,000 crore of the Ladhani group turnover of Rs 7,000 crore. It is India’s largest independent franchise bottler, with 43 production lines turning out 29,000 bottles of “cold drinks” a minute.

S.N. Ladhani’s ambition is to nearly triple the current capacity by the end of this decade.

As for being an angel investor, remember Air Deccan, which allowed the masses to fly at prices lower than a train ticket?

“Gopinath [Air Deccan’s founder] and I were neighbours in Bangalore, where I ran a bottling franchise,” says Ladhani. Gopinath got Ladhani to spare some vacant land for a helicopter repair base.

When Gopinath began dreaming of an airline, Ladhani came up with the money and became vice-chairman of Air Deccan, launched in 2003. (Ladhani also got into Bangalore’s real estate business during this time.)

Electric vehicles? The soft-drinks business depends on hundreds of vehicles to move stocks from factories to retailers. Ladhani financed the purchase of over 2,000 batterypowered small trucks and three-wheelers. That got him into a Tata Motors dealership in Kanpur and Lucknow.

Conscious about making this venture sustainable, SLMG will have 5000 EVs by 2024 and 10,000 by 2025, covering 80% of our overall fleet.

Real estate beginnings

Ladhani did not start life as an entrepreneur. In 1960, at 18, he began working for a railway contractor as a labour supervisor for Rs 60 a month. Ladhani’s honesty struck the contractor, who gave him a contract to execute. Soon, Ladhani became independent. After stints in various places, he returned to UP.

In 1982, when Parle’s Ramesh Chauhan (later of Thums Up fame) was looking for a bottler in the Faizabad area, Ladhani grabbed the offer. Chauhan was going great guns with his brands, such as Thums Up and Limca, after Coca-Cola’s exit from India in 1977.

Ladhani impressed Chauhan So much that when Chauhan had problems with his bottler in Bangalore, he asked Ladhani to run it.

When Pepsi entered India in 1989, Chauhan’s bottler in Agra switched to the multinational, and Ladhani got the Thums Up franchise. Soon, Coca-Cola was back in India. Even as Chauhan considered selling his iconic brands to it, Ladhani took up the multinational’s first bottling plant at Hathras in UP to relaunch Coke in India.

This year, 2023, marks Ladhani’s 30 years in the bottling business.

Staying ahead of the curve

SLMG is implementing its most ambitious project yet: A plant to recycle millions of used PET bottles into plastic bottles that can be used again. The company uses renewable energy extensively to power its operations. Its distribution chain depends on e-vehicles.

Since the business is powered by information technology, it is hunting for a software company to move all the coding in-house.

A revered figure in the Sindhi community, Ladhani begins the day with yoga, then calls up his top management. His family members in key posts are not spared. (SLMG Beverages got its name from the initials of the four brothers: S for S.N. Ladhani, L for Laxman Das, M for Mohan Das, and G for Gulab Chand.)

“The biggest challenge today is to find the right people and then develop their skills for world-class processes to stay ahead of the curve,” Ladhani says. “The next is to get good people.”

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