Grace Under Pressure: Arpit Agrawal is using technology to transform the Vishal Group

Disclaimer: This article is intended for international audiences

Doing business in Nepal is never easy. The roads break, the power fails, governments change and the rules change along with them. The Himalayas are indeed beautiful, but they can complicate transport. Add in some earthquakes, floods, and mudslides, and it’s enough to make you leave.

And yet the Vishal Group has thrived here. It all started out in a textile shop in Dharan, an eastern city of about 160,000 people, in 1949. The Agrawal family, recent arrivals from India, came to Nepal to do business and from a small shop selling bolts of cloth, with records kept by hand, they expanded. Today, the Vishal Group employs 21,000 people across industries as diverse as steel, insurance, real estate and education. It operates via a robust established distributor base in 29 countries. The total number of consumers at its fingertips number at about two and a half billion. 

Executive director Arpit Agrawal is the fourth generation of the Agrawal family to sit at the table. He grew up listening as older relatives discussed risk, margins, and expansion, and losses too. He watched them deliberate and come to decisions. 

“Growing up, I observed business strategy discussions,” Arpit remembers. The lessons he learned stayed with him. Agrawal honed his skills in classrooms and auditoriums in the US next, where he studied international finance at Florida Southern College, and Hult International Business School. In Nepal, he has put this worldliness into good use. Agrawal has always looked beyond Nepal and sees emerging markets as the driver of future growth. While risky, with the right, flexible infrastructure in place, he believes that Vishal Group can only benefit from going where others are too intimidated to seriously play.

“Throughout my career, I have worked with global consumer companies to help them establish scalable commercial infrastructure in high-growth emerging economies,” he says. Agrawal has turned to cloud-based planning to make this happen, updating inventory systems and adding in predictive analytics. He decided to rework distribution routes for optimization, finding better fits for goods so that they could get to where they needed to be, and has worked to overcome challenges in fragmented markets where the regulatory landscape is unclear. 

“I am particularly interested in how digital transformation and financial infrastructure evolution can help accelerate consumer market development in frontier economies,” Arpit says of his work.

Multinational brands were skeptical at first, but these results have borne out this approach.

“These innovations led to significant growth in our fast-moving consumer goods between 2014 and 2022,” says Agrawal. He notes that more than 80 brands and 3000+ products have been added since he became more involved with the business as its network expanded across Asia.

The performance of Vishal Group’s beauty vertical has been especially radiant. Agrawal explains that distribution is just one piece of the puzzle, and that it requires “last-mile execution,” including structured education and training programs to get things in place. This also includes the introduction of beauty technology, onboarding of beauty advisors, and localized brand storytelling that, in his words, “protects the DNA and positioning of each brand.”

What the group can now offer is particularly relevant for premium beauty, skincare, and fragrance houses, he says, where consumer experience and brand education are critical to long-term success.

Partners have stayed with Vishal Group because of its innovative approaches, which he regards as a sign of trust, albeit one earned slowly. Agrawal calls his approach operational empathy. It requires thinking at a global scale, but also knowing how to win over customers in the local setting. Models are adapted and markets are educated. It’s not just enough to get the products there. People need to know they are available and why they can improve their lives. This is what Agrawal has done masterfully.

But he is not just strictly business. Agrawal is also vice president of the Vishal Group Foundation, a transformational charity which aims to make changes that have lasting impact. 

After the 2015 Gorkha earthquake, when buildings toppled and more than 9,000 people died, the group sent tents, food, water, and supplies into remote districts. During COVID-19, relief packets went out to quarantine centers. Even on good days, the foundation is investing in Nepal’s future, sponsoring promising students and distributing books to poorer families.

“I navigate the interests of our board and match them with the contemporary humanitarian needs of Nepali society,” he says. “Our motto has always been building better lives,” he adds. “We do that through ethical enterprise and positive community impact.”

For Arpit Agrawal, there is no space between business and responsibility. They are intrinsically connected and one cannot exist without the other. For a global business it’s not just philosophy. It’s survival.

ADVT.

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