Olam International: Classroom Case Discussion on 14.08.

2013

In 20 years, CEO Sunny Verghese built the Singapore-based firm from a small
Nigerian export company into a global leader in several niche commodities. The
case illustrates a number of concepts, including growth through adjacencies, the
agricultural supply chain and global trade flows, opportunities and challenges in
African agriculture, and the impact of 2008 financial crisis on agribusiness firms.

Instruction: All students must come to the class after reading the case
thoroughly to participate in the Case discussion for 2 hours. Participants
would be cold-called to answer any question or to lead the discussion. A
pre-discussion fact quiz of 8 minutes is likely to follow at 18.40-18.48 hr.
and the quiz answer sheet serves as Attendance for the class.

Some Discussion Questions:

1. What lessons could a would-be entrepreneur learn from early successes of

Olam ?

2. How would you appraise the promise of each of the three growth pillars (p.9)?

3. How do you answer Sunnys questions at the end of the case?

4. Compare Olam internationals growth strategy with that of an MNC firm such
as Nestle.

5. What happened and Update for Olam International. (To be done only by Any
Group, informed to me at the earliest)

Other questions on Supply Chain, Finance, HR and such other relevant issues would
be raised on the spot by the Professor. Class participation would be assessed.

Supplementary Reading Materials:

Article: Zook, C., & Allen, J. Growth outside the core. Harvard Business Review,
December 2003. (11 pages). This article is referred in the case and is available from
FMS Library.

Growth in an adjacent market is tougher than it looks; three-quarters of the time, the effort fails. But
companies can change those odds dramatically. Results from a five-year study of corporate growth
conducted by Bain & Co. reveal that adjacency expansion succeeds only when built around strong core
businesses that have the potential to become market leaders. And the best place to look for adjacency
opportunities is inside a company's strongest customers. The study also found that the most successful
companies were able to outgrow their rivals consistently and profitably by developing a formula for
pushing out the boundaries of their core businesses in predictable, repeatable ways. Companies use their
repeatability formulas to expand into any number of adjacencies. Some companies make repeated
geographic moves, whereas others apply a superior business model to new segments. In other cases,
companies develop hybrid approaches. The successful repeaters in the study had two common
characteristics: they were extraordinarily disciplined, applying rigorous screens before they made an
adjacency move, and in almost all cases, they developed their repeatable formulas by carefully studying
their customers and their customers' economics.