Ajay Bijli has been building his Vasant Vihar house for 14 years. It’s a project that is almost as old as his business, PVR Ltd, the largest movie exhibition company in India which he founded in 1995. No one in the family knows when the house will be ready. “Ask Ajay. That is his pet project,” says his brother Sanjeev. At present, the brothers live together in the family’s ancestral mansion on Rohtak Road in Delhi.
Bijli, too, hesitates to give a clear answer. “Probably next year,” he says evasively. Time is hardly relevant. Sixty architects have come and gone and the two-storey structure has been razed four times. “Ajay is a perfectionist. He is particular about each element of the house. If he doesn’t like it, he will redo it,” says a top executive at PVR.
In many ways, 47-year-old Bijli has built PVR along the same exacting lines. Obsessed with creating a brand and not just a chain of multiplexes, the entrepreneur oversees every detail of his expanding empire. Nothing is deemed insignificant: Employees say he accords the same attention to the cleanliness of washrooms that he does to the installation of the latest technology in his multiplexes.
There have been occasions when he has spent Rs 10 crore to set up a single screen, though the average expenditure is Rs 4 crore per screen. (Two years ago, that was 50 percent more than the industry average, though competitors are catching up to PVR’s standards and updating their technology.) But Bijli always had faith in his brand’s growing equity, and was confident enough to compensate the cost with ticket rates that none of his competitors would dare to demand. (They still don’t.) For instance, a ticket at the Vasant Kunj, Delhi, Directors Cut cinema—PVR’s top product which offers plush seats, dine-in facilities and other amenities—can cost Rs 1,400, about four times that of a regular ticket. Bijli has been taking such risks in other ways too: For instance, he opened an 11-screen multiplex in Bangalore in 2003 when even five-screen multiplexes were rare.
In the process, he has turned the single-screen side business, Priya Cinema, that his father had bought in the 1970s into a Rs 1,500-crore operation.
“His properties are the best in the industry,” says Sumant Bhargava, managing director of Stargaze Entertainment, which runs a 30-screen operation in India’s tier-2 and -3 cities. He points out that there is still a clear difference between PVR’s properties and that of Cinemax that Bijli bought in late 2012. This acquisition of his Mumbai-based peer Rasesh Kanakia’s Cinemax for a total of Rs 600 crore was a deal that catapulted him to the number one position in the industry, overtaking Anil Ambani’s Big Cinemas and DK Jain’s Inox Movies. With this move, PVR’s revenues ballooned to Rs 1,270 crore in 2012 from Rs 669 crore a year earlier.
In the two years since it acquired Cinemax, PVR’s share price increased by 178 percent while the Sensex grew by 39 percent. PVR’s stock price on October 9 stood at Rs 649.
The acquisition may have altered PVR’s DNA and, by extension, even Bijli’s, who has been bitten by the expansion bug ever since. Before the deal, he had built 213 screens over 17 years, an average of less than 15 screens a year. The Cinemax acquisition added 138 screens in one shot. Today, PVR has 454 screens across 102 properties in 43 cities.
Sanjeev, 42, who is joint managing director of PVR Ltd, admits that they were a tad frustrated with the pace of growth—that is, until they acquired Cinemax. “Now, we have become restless for growth,” he says. Bijli adds, “We have tasted blood. We want to reach 1,000 screens by 2018.” That would mean adding 100 screens a year, a pace so far unheard of. So far, Bijli has been selective about the malls and developers PVR associates with. With the 1,000-screen target, however, can he continue to be choosy? For a chairman who is known to delay the opening of a new screen if quality is at stake, this aggressive expansion is a new beast. But he reiterates that the brand’s excellence will not be compromised. “I have to be careful. I need to keep an eye on the company’s Ebitda (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) and I don’t want to get carried away. I have seen too many companies going belly up using the wrong yardstick [for success],” says Bijli, who is revelling in his number one status. “Who doesn’t want to be on top?”
GOING BACK TO HIS ROOTS
THE THREE GOLDEN RULES
Bijli’s colleagues recount similar stories, including one where a customer’s complaint led the company to install a 3D screen within six days at a PVR property in Bhopal. He credits the people around him for pushing him to achieve perfection. “When I was in school, my teachers would always say that they expected big things from me,” says Bijli, who studied at Delhi’s Modern School, and excelled in basketball, cricket and bowling.
(This story appears in the 31 October, 2014 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)