Jayanti Chauhan To Head Bisleri International After Tatas Walk Out

Jayanti Chauhan, daughter of Bisleri International Chairman Ramesh Chauhan, will now be at the helm of the bottled water company, a report by the Economic Times (ET) said on Monday. Jayanti is currently the vice chairperson of the company.

"Jayanti will run the company with our professional team and we do not want to sell the business," Ramesh Chauhan told ET. She will work with a team headed by chief executive Angelo George.

Last November, Bisleri International entered into talks with Tata Consumer Products (TCPL) to sell a majority stake in the company for Rs 6,000-7,000 crore. It said that the deal would be completed in the next '7-8 months'.

However, last week, TCPL said that it had ceased the talks and that it "has not entered into any definitive agreement or binding commitment on this matter."

"The company wishes to update that it has now ceased negotiations with Bisleri with regard to a potential transaction and to confirm that the company has not entered into any definitive agreement or binding commitment on this matter," it said in a regulatory filing.

Jayanti has been involved in the company's business for several years. Of late, she has been working on expanding Bisleri's Vedika brand.

Bisleri was originally an Italian company set up by Felice Bisleri. It entered Mumbai in 1965 with its packaged drinking water brand. Four years later, Ramesh Chauhan and his brothers acquired the firm for Rs 4 lakh, according to market information.

At present, it has over 122 operational plants and 4,500 distributors across India and in neighbouring countries. According to media reports, Bisleri is likely to clock sales of Rs 2,500 crore and earn a net profit of over Rs 200 crore in the financial year 2022-23 (FY23). In FY22, TCPL's revenue from operations stood at Rs 12,425 crore.

If the deal had gone through, TCPL would have become the largest in the Indian fast-moving consumer goods space. The biggest deal in this space so far, happened in April 2020, when Hindustan Unilever acquired Horlicks from GSK for Rs 3,045 crore.