Cultivating Financial Resilience In Dynamic Markets
Industry stalwarts suggest businesses to be flexible, agile and adoptive towards unprecedented distractions and changes which may occur in the market
“In the last four years, things have really been very volatile and CFOs are facing a lot of challenges. We have to grow also and maintain profitability also. Unless we don’t maintain current business, growth will not be there,” said Sanjay Upadhyay, Director – Finance and Group CFO, Deepak Nitrite, commenting on what he is gazing on the macro-economic front and the environment.
He added, “Things are happening at such a fast pace. Everyday people are watching what is happening to Fed rates. If someone is in a Forex or export business, they have to keep track of these things – whether rupee will appreciate or depreciate.”
“To create resilience, we will have to be updated and have knowledge of the market behaviour. We can’t be over ambitious,” suggested Upadhyay on how CFOs can rework their plans to continue exhibiting resilience in the market.
“There have been a lot of distractions in the last four years. It is a new normal and I believe in the very famous quote ‘change is the only constant’ and that is going to stay. As a result, the economy and the companies are more integrated with the global environment. So any decision, in any region of the world, impacts us as an organisation. How we react to these distractions, and how we come back is really important,” underlined Sushil Kumar, Whole-Time Director and CFO, GE T&D India.
“If we take the example of Covid, most of the companies have bounced back and some of them have actually come back stronger because they were able to adopt to the changes and they had the agility to come back in a very strong manner. First step is to mitigate the risk and second is to leverage that into an opportunity,” stated Kumar stressing on how CFOs have geared up for the changed reality.
Elaborating on what is critical for CFOs, Preeti Chheda, CFO, K Raheja Corp Investment Managers, emphasised, “It is very critical for us as CFOs that how robust our models are to adjust to the changing norms. I come from a real-estate sector which is very capital intensive, so any change to interest rates has a serious bearing on the way our business works. A significant thing is to keep a watch on what is happening and keep business flexible enough.”
Sharing insights from the telecommunication industry, Gaurav Kant, CFO, Shyam Spectra, highlighted, “One thing that has started happening since Covid is that we started talking about what is happening post-Covid. But for telecom industry, there has been a lot of turbulence happening, every two to three years since 2008-09.”
“We have to do so many different things but we have to focus on how to do same things differently; this is where we will get better returns and we will be able to get more output,” he went on to say.
The eminent speakers were sharing their views in a panel discussion in BW CFO World Finance Leadership & Strategy Summit 2024 And Best CFO & Finance Strategy Awards, held on Friday, 10 May 2024 at The Imperial, New Delhi.