If somebody argued ethanol is as sexy a business as building spacecraft or sequencing the human genome, you wouldn’t be faulted for suppressing a chuckle. After all, what is there to ethanol? Even the folks from the Neolithic era knew that this intoxicating ingredient in alcoholic beverages could induce a pretty good buzz. But if you indulge the irrepressible Pramod Chaudhary for a moment, he’ll argue passionately why you’ve got it all wrong. He will tell you how he and his company, Praj Industries, hope to make it the fuel of the future.
As things turn out, the founder of Praj is ostensibly in the middle of a mad race to change the world we live in. And he hopes to be the first to reach the finish line. At stake is a market estimated at 189 billion litres by 2020 according to a US government study. Chaudhary wants to take a good shot at being remembered by history textbooks as one of the men who weaned the world away from fossil fuels like petrol and diesel. Of course, it is another matter altogether that Praj wasn’t originally built to change the world.
A few years ago, some smart entrepreneurs, Chaudhary included, had figured out how to isolate ethanol from food crops like sugarcane, wheat, soya and palm oil. With a large addressable market, businesses were quick to latch on to the men who ran these businesses and exploited every edible commodity they could to extract ethanol out of it.
(This story appears in the 31 July, 2009 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)
I think this analyst is looking in the wrong place. Praj's strength has always been as a project engineering company that has made good use of technologies it buys. It should continue with that. As for addressing the deadline for switching over to the next generation ethanol in the US, maybe Praj can find a suitable partner by then, or it can focus on markets that are free of such obstacles. Praj should forget about being sexy in the eyes of the Vinod Khoslas of the world and get on with its knitting.
on Aug 12, 2009Praj has always stolen technologies and materials and hence can never innovate. It is an unethical company. I wish the author should have looked at that angle. In the past it came up beacuse of political patronage of sugar lobby in Maharashtra. Such companies can never compete in the real worl of high technology and innovation.
on Jul 26, 2009Please tell us something new.You are focusing on the difficulties of breaking down lignin whereas much of the ethanol industry's focus is on the relatively simpler cellulose. Moreover one cannot make "predictions" about whether a work of research will be successful or not.Also research is always "technically difficult to achieve".If it were easy then every tom richard and harry would have started a praj. The company has almost zero debt and a very good return on equity running now for more than 5 years.The whole ethanol industry is in trouble.So i don't think its fair to single out Praj in the way that the author has. More so its not fair to make a judgment and write a company off. PS: The cap and trade bill in the US would be beneficial for Praj like companies.Short this one at your own risk.
on Jul 22, 2009