Anand Mahindra: CNBC's Asian business leader

Anand Mahindra vice chairman and managing director, Mahindra & Mahindra, is the winner of CNBC's Asian Business Leader Award for 2005. The award aims at recognising outstanding performance by a corporate in the Asian continent. CNBC-TV18 shares with domain-b, excerpts of an interview with Mahindra.

It is very fitting that you should win the award because this is the year when India has been going out — it has been a year of huge investments outside but for you personally what has it been? Has it been a year or two years where you have really seen unlocking value?
If we were to look back, then yes, that clearly would be the highlight of the last two years. Essentially it's a promise made long ago that we finally kept.

Back in 1994, when we actually developed this entire structure and sectors, we made two promises to the market and that was that we were going to really focus on these sectors, that we were going to empower them…give them professional presidents who would be running these sectors as we call them.

Then we committed that each of these sectors would have a flagship company that would be listed. Therefore (we found a way) to unlock value, and to provide investors who wanted focused verticals in which to invest, with an avenue in which to share in the Mahindra Group's wealth creation.

It seems pretty easy when you speak of it but were there difficulties and what took you so long to come to the decision?
It wasn't easy at all. I will never make anything that is easy in business. But the fact is that we made that promise in 1994, we didn't really think that it would take till 2006. We thought it would be earlier but the fact was that our timetable was not predicated only on how the companies were doing.

If that were the only variable, then we would have done it much earlier. It was also a function of the markets, external economic cycles, and receptivity to public issues.