Sanjiv Bajaj is EY Entrepreneur of Year; E Sreedharan gets award

Sanjiv Bajaj, managing director of Bajaj Finserv, the financial holding company of the Bajaj Group, was named the EY Entrepreneur of the Year in a ceremony held in Mumbai on February 15, 2017.

A nine-member jury of global business consultancy EY led by Dilip Shanghvi, managing director of Sun Pharmaceuticals Industries bestowed the honour on Bajaj for leading his company to become the country's top name in financial services with solutions across lending, life and general insurance and wealth advisory.

''Sanjiv Bajaj will now represent India at the EY World Entrepreneur of the Year award (WEOY) in Monte Carlo from 13-17 June, 2018,'' EY said in a statement.

Bajaj is the 48-year-old son of Bajaj Group patriarch Rahul Bajaj.

The company also conferred the lifetime achievement award on 'Metro Man' E Sreedharan, who spearheaded metro projects in Delhi, Kolkata, Kochi, and Lucknow.

Others who received awards in various categories include Zerodha founder and chief executive Nithin Kamath (start-up), SpiceJet chairman Ajay Singh (business transformation), Dalmia Bharat Group's Puneet Dalmia (manufacturing), Enzen Global Solution's chairman Satheesh Kumar K R (services), Edelweiss Group's Rashesh Shah (financial services), Page Industries' Sunder Genomal (consumer products and retail), Glenmark Pharmaceutical's Glenn Saldanha (life sciences and healthcare), Bharti Infratel's Akhil Gupta (entrepreneurial CEO), and ReNew Power Ventures founder Sumant Sinha (energy, real estate and infrastructure).

''The winners this year comprise first-time entrepreneurs who are disrupting sectors with innovation or dominating new industries as also individuals with family enterprises, where despite being in conventional businesses, they have created massive differentiation with their aspirations, innovations and execution intensity,'' EY India chairman Rajiv Memani said in the statement.

In a cover story that appeared in Forbes India in May 2016, the business magazine had examined how Bajaj Finserv has created a financial powerhouse straddling multiple business lines by combining a sharp focus on sustainable profitability with innovation.

Bajaj Finserv has had a unique strategy, where the diversified portfolio provides for some fields which are profit drivers and others that build scale, according to Forbes. This helps reduce cyclicality in growth and assets quality. The main mantra for the company's success continues to be profits, innovation and technology in each of their business lines, rather than trying to capture market share right from the start.

The market capitalisation of the company is Rs81,664.15 crore as of February 2018.