Sai ramakrishna karuturi biography examples

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I immediately turned back to Bengaluru and booked myself on the first available flight to Africa.

It was the second turning point for Karuturi Global. But I had a gut feeling that we could be big. Essentially, everybody is a human being first and so it’s important to relate to them at that level. We were the lowest cost farm in Bengaluru when we set up.

We bought 188 hectares for $67 million in Kenya to take on the global competition. It was a great experience; I was young and full of dreams. These were not traditionally on the radar of big flower cultivators but it was a good time to go global and tap these markets.

sai ramakrishna karuturi biography examples

Once we got a foothold in the African market, we bought large farms in Kenya. For example, last year, we lost our maize crop and incurred a loss of $15 million due to flash floods in Ethiopia. Now you can make business there without needing so much money. It has a capacity of 6,000 tonnes per annum and we are processing and bottling gherkins for exports to Europe and the US.

I hope to be a substantial player in the global gherkin market soon. I have diversified into agriculture. Our roses were all homegrown, and we managed to cut costs by almost 30 per cent because of that. In February 1999, just before Valentine’s Day, the flight taking our roses to Europe was cancelled.

Out Of The Dust Grow The Roses Of Success

When Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi was looking to start a new business quickly,  East Africa beckoned.

He identified Kenya and Ethiopia for cultivating and exporting roses, bought 311,000 hectares of land, employed 10,000 people and today his company, Karuturi Global Ltd, produces around 555 million stems a year and is widely recognized as the pioneer of cut flower production.

Entering into the Far-Eastern market was one of the decisions I took there.

Chancing upon a rose garden was a serendipitous moment for me. He had left Karuturi to work for an African company. So the opportunities are there.”

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Related Topics: #Africa, #Bureaucrats, #Ethiopia, #Investment, #Kenya, #November 2011.

Ramakrishna Karuturi: Man behind Karuturi Global - world's largest producer of cut roses

Three years ago when Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi set up shop in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, his company was already the world’s largest producer of cut roses.

In the last seven years, we have grown to become the world’s largest producer of cut roses with an annual production of 650 million stems.