Beyond Chocolate

In February last year, Mondelez India, the maker of Cadbury, reported its worst performance in almost a decade. Revenues dipped from Rs6,562.7 crore in 2015 to Rs5,411.4 crore in 2016, while profits fell over 60 per cent. Though the November 2016 demonetisation was the immediate cause consumption of chocolates and biscuits dipped over 25 per cent the chocolate maker had been seeing lacklustre revenue growth for almost two years prior to that.

There were murmurs of the erstwhile Cadbury senior team being unhappy under the new leadership of Kraft (Kraft took over Cadbury in 2010; in 2012, Kraft was split into two, with one part, Mondelez, focussing on snacking portfolio in fast emerging markets such as India, West Asia and Africa). There was a spate of exits. Cadbury veteran Anand Kripalu (MD) quit. So did Chandramouli Venkatesan, also MD, in 2015. "Mondelez India faced an exodus after the formation of the new entity and more recently because of adoption of the category led business model due to which there were some lay offs, too," says the CEO of a leading executive search company. Today, the company has four category heads chocolates, gums, biscuits and beverages in Singapore who take complete charge of profit and loss of their respective categories in the region, while the country head drives