One of the government’s most important visions of Amrit Kaal 2047 is to develop world class next generation ports, and the government of India through various documents such as the Maritime India vision that was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has realised that maritime is a long term assignment aimed at the larger vision of making India a developed nation by 2047. A road map has been put out for all the participants of the maritime sector—government and private— including different areas such as shipping, inland waterways etc. These were some of the observations by Sunil Paliwal, Chairperson, Chennai Port Trust during a panel discussion on Navigating Future Directions: Growth, Connectivity, Sustainability and the Roadmap at the THE WEEK Maritime Conclave 2024 in Chennai. 

Paliwal pointed out that both the Chennai port and the Kamarajar port align with this and have a long term road map. “We have to see what we will do in the next 25 years in terms of infrastructure, connectivity and digitisation. At the same time we are aware of the implications of climate change. These things are not static—as to when Kamarajar port started its operations in June 2001 it was a cold port and now it is a multi cargo port. Kamarajar port is situated outside the city and it is a new port and only 25 years old. We are now handling our cargo handling capacities and we should be able to reach around 178 million tonnes per annum by 2047 from the current 58 million tonnes,” remarked Paliwal. 

He informed that at Chennai port they are aiming to handle the biggest vessels of the world. They would also focus on increasing port connectivity to the Chennai port. He said that they were already in the heart of the city and in association with the NHAI they are putting up an elevated corridor and the work is already on and even if cargo cannot be brought easily inside the port then there is a multi modal logistics park that is being developed at Mappedu. They also have a train shed at Jollarpettai where cargo can be assembled and re-assembled. On the other hand, Kamarajar port is also looking at connectivity. “We are also working on soft solutions and in Chennai port we are also rolling out Enterprise Business Solution (EBS). Kamarajar port has also developed its own port handling solution,” added Paliwal. 

During the panel discussion, Malini Shankar, Vice Chancellor, Indian Maritime University empahsised that it is high time that all the stakeholders of the Maritime sector jumped into the pool of research. “The Cochin Ship Yard for instance is leading in R&D and are now building ships for international clients. The Maritime University is a very nascent and is only 13-14 years old.  We urge the industry to partner in research. We had this convention to understand the needs and issues of the industry (shipping, waterways and logistics) and what needs to be done. We got ideas from it,” remarked Shankar. 

She also informed that recently a patent was filed by the IMU Kolkata campus jointly done with private corporation. “We are now building the capacity to do research. Ship building requires trained manpower as it is not available. An ITI can be identified and could be upskilled for ship building. At the same time we also need to have clusters for ports and ship building ship yards as there is non availability of parts, spare parts and smaller things that can be made locally. We have had for instance a discussion with the government of Tamil Nadu for a cluster in Coimbatore. Our university has also started an incubation centre as well,” said Shankar. 

Paliwal, meanwhile, added that maritime sector had shown excellent coordination between academia and the industry. “For instance earlier when we use to put in a berth or a terminal in a port we in case we required simulation studies we had to go to countries such as the Netherlands but now we can use the the same thing at IIT Madras,” said Paliwal. 

Another panelist Jayant Singh, Project Director (Infrastructure) NITI Aayog felt that whatever the maritime sector provides is a service which has to be cheap and efficient. He said that the problem with a country like India is that over last few decades it had not looked at its infrastructure very seriously and a lot of catching up needed to be done. “The quantum of FDI in the port sector has come up and but there is a lot of scope for improvement. One thing we need to address is the multi modality seamless integration and connectivity between the shipping and the hinterland. There is also a logistics challenge which needs to be addressed is the empty return ratio –one way loaded one way empty. At the same time there should be better synergy between the central and the state government in the maritime sector. There is however immense opportunity as the maritime sector is the fastest growing part in GDP the world over,” pointed out Singh.

With the cost-of-living crisis still hitting families hard, many people are picking up side hustles to make a bit of extra cash for Christmas.

Single mum Kate Propert, who lives in Bristol with her daughter, is one savvy saver who has done just that – and now she’s earning hundreds of pounds from her sofa.

1

The 39-year-old, who works as a surgical care practitioner, has raked in £1,200 in the past year by selling old clothes on eBay.

She told The Sun: “This is the perfect way to help save for Christmas. I put some of my earnings from the marketplace into savings across the year, and this means I build up a pot to help fund the festive period.”

Having a little more money on top of her monthly salary helps take a bit of pressure off her squeezed family budget.

“My energy bills went up again from the start of October, and my weekly food shop has gone up too,” said Kate.

“That’s why selling on eBay is so great – as it means I can make some extra cash. As a single parent, every little helps.”

The entrepreneurial mum is a long time eBay lover. For almost a decade, she has been boosting her bank balance by selling stuff, but on a smaller scale.

She told The Sun: “I began my eBay journey back in 2015. My earliest sales were items from my wedding, including my dress, veil, shoes – as well as some bridesmaid dresses.”

In the beginning, Kate’s motivation was the desire to declutter and free up more space at home, but now she’s earning around £100 extra a month selling old bits and bobs.

“All the items I list are things from around the house that we longer use or need,” she said.

“Over the years, I’ve listed a huge variety of bits and pieces including home-ware, garden tools and children’s stuff.

“Recent sales include an unused professional make-up kit for £135, a Zeta Citi stroller pushchair for £80, an IKEA desk for £35, a Golf Wang ‘save the bees’ hoody for £35, and a riding helmet for £25,” she added.

“I’ve also just sold a Frozen puzzle and a wooden spelling game. The run-up to Christmas is a great time for selling kids clothes and toys.”

The resourceful mum is always willing to have a go at finding a buyer for things she no longer uses.

“I’ve even listed dog bowls, mudguards and artificial plants,” she said. “I’ve found new homes for all these things – and they’ve all helped me make some extra cash.

“You really can sell anything on eBay. One really unexpected profit was getting £5 for a bulk of old hair pins.”

The busy mum is able to do her listings from her sofa and they take just minutes each.

“I often put the time in when I’m sitting in front of the TV in the evening,” she said.

Recent changes by eBay

eBay recently announced (October 1), that it is now free for people to sell across all categories on the platform (with the exclusion of motor listings, including the sale of cars, motorcycles and vehicles.)

Prior to this, private sellers have had to pay a fee of more than 13%. Read more with ‘Massive change to eBay selling fees could save you serious cash – how does it compare to Depop and Vinted?’

“This has been a game-changer for me,” said Kate.

“I’ve already sold so much on the platform, but this makes me even more keen to do so. I’m really excited to see how the new features will help improve my sales – and boost my selling journey.”

The savvy mum has been sorting through every room in the house to see what else she can list and sell including a custom-made opal ring made, which cost Kate around £200.

“I’m planning to list this in the next few weeks – and will look to price it at around £180,” she said.

“This would free up a nice extra bit of cash for Christmas – plus the ring will make a fantastic gift for someone else. November is a great time to list items you know will make for great presents.”

Kate says eBay’s change to ‘free listings’ for sellers might see more individuals give eBay a try.

“This change could encourage others to do what I do – and sell unused items they have in their homes.”

Kate’s top tips for selling on eBay

Kate has urged sellers to take care to list your item accurately using relevant keywords. This will increase the chances of buyers finding your items.

Be sure to communicate clearly and responsively with the buyers throughout the process, she added.

“Try selecting the ‘Use AI description’ option for a helping hand when writing descriptions for your listings,” she explained.

“The tool automatically creates attention-grabbing captions which can make it easier for buyers to make a decision. 

“Remember that there are protections in place when using eBay, such as the Money Back Guarantee. With this program, if a buyer has any issue with their purchase, eBay will support them to get a refund.”

April 2016 onwards, shipyards are under the harmonised list of infrastructure, but not many banks have actually funded it from the infra point of view, said Madhu Nair, chairman and managing director of Cochin Shipyard Ltd. He was talking in a panel discussion at THE WEEK Maritime Conclave 2024 in Chennai. 

Nair said the problem is not coming from the infrastructure, but from the shipping part of it. 

“One thing that many people don’t fully appreciate is, in shipping, in shipbuilding, for a hundred million dollar shipbuilding turnover, the banking volumes are 2.5 to 2.8 times, which not many people are fully aware of as there is cash and the non-cash part of it. 

“You can actually go wrong on the non-cash side. A shipyard goes bad on the inability to pay on the non-cash side because there are refund guarantees involved. And the refund guarantees sit with the bank. And if the bank didn’t have that kind of deep expertise in financing, the whole thing goes down,” he said.

Expertise in shipping finance

Nair said today there is only one bank in the country, the State Bank of India, which has the expertise in shipping finance. 

“I build a shipyard, what is the kind of money a banker will come and support? Or you can raise from the markets? Somebody needs to really understand the value, and the value is not a normal valuation game; you are trying to value a shipyard. The deep-rooted expertise in the debt markets that this country long ago had—we had the Shipping Credit Investment Corporation of India, we had an ICICI—we let go of these institutions,” he said. 

This is an audio transcript of the Behind the Money podcast episode: ‘Private equity’s experiment with worker ownership’

Michela Tindera
Private equity has long held a reputation for being ruthless. A no-holds-barred industry. 

Antoine Gara
These were very scrappy, mercenary dealmakers. And with their really iconic investments of that era, like RJR Nabisco, they had no real compulsion about breaking up a company and selling off different parts, which really struck a nerve in the mainstream of America. 

Michela Tindera
My colleague Antoine Gara says that in the 1980s, the private equity industry relied on deals that use lots of debt. That kind of strategy often led to collateral damage for workers, while PE executives took home massive windfalls. 

Antoine Gara
In the mid-1980s, the private equity firm KKR did a leveraged buyout of grocery store chain Safeway. And they used a very small sliver of equity to buy what was one of America’s biggest companies. And after they acquired the supermarket, the company went through brutal lay-offs and salary cuts, and it became hugely controversial. 

Michela Tindera
But now a new strategy is gaining some ground that has some firms deciding to share a bit of that wealth with their workers. But why are firms doing this and what’s in it for them?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I’m Michela Tindera from the Financial Times. Today on Behind the Money, how private equity realised playing nice could be good for business.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

This particular attempt by private equity to have a softer image begins with a guy named Pete. 

Pete Stavros
I’m Pete Stavros, co-head of global private equity at KKR. 

Michela Tindera
About 15 years ago, Pete took over running KKR as investments in the industrial sector. That’s like manufacturing businesses. And in that role, he noticed a problem. 

Pete Stavros
In manufacturing, you often come up against the following situation: the workforce, they tend to not like their jobs but at the same time are responsible for much of your success or failure as a company because they are determining the quality of the product, whether the product is delivered on time, things that determine your efficiency as a manufacturer. 

Michela Tindera
So Pete started to think about how he could get workers from different kinds of industries more motivated. 

Pete Stavros
That led to experimenting with: are there different ways to engage with all colleagues, not just the senior folks, but could you engage with the entirety of a workforce, get them more engaged on the job, get them less likely to quit and have the company benefit as well? So could you come up with a programme that was both good for workers and good for companies? 

Michela Tindera
Pete found what he believes is a way to solve this problem. Let me explain. Take, for example, one company called GeoStabilization International or GSI for short. KKR invested in the company in 2018. 

Pete Stavros
Geo Stabilisation at one point had a 50 per cent worker turnover rate. 

Michela Tindera
Now, GSI is an interesting company. It basically works on preventing landslides from happening or cleaning up after them if they do. 

Pete Stavros
It’s hard work. People sometimes have to be away from home for weeks at a time because it’s an emergency and they have to stay until it’s done. That’s tough. And if you’re not an owner and you don’t really have much of an incentive, you know, maybe you find something easier. 

Michela Tindera
And this is where Pete’s strategy comes into play. To encourage workers to stay, KKR offers GSI’s employees equity in the business as part of their compensation. And Pete says that more employees started to stick around despite the tough work. 

Pete Stavros
Once you have, you know, more information being shared with you about the business and where we’re headed and why we’re headed there and how you can help — and by the way, you’re going to participate in all the value that you’re helping to create — that quit rate went from 50 per cent to 17 per cent. 

Michela Tindera
Flash forward to today, and many of GSI’s employees are recipients of a sizeable payday. In September, KKR announced that it was going to be selling GSI. The sale meant a $1bn payout and $75mn of that was going to the company’s blue-collar employees. That meant that a lot of GSI employees would be receiving six-figure sums. For many of these employees, this is life-changing money. It’s the chance to put a down payment on a house or to set themselves up for early retirement. And for Pete, it’s been good for KKR, too. 

Pete Stavros
We made five times our money. There aren’t a lot of five X returns in private equity period, but certainly not being exited right now. You know, you can unleash a lot of growth when you suddenly stop losing half your workforce every year. And so when we look at our performance in the deals where we’ve done this, not only has it been the right thing to do and allowed us to deliver wealth for workers and have more engaged people who are happier on the job, less likely to quit, but also deliver better investment outcomes and build stronger companies. 

Michela Tindera
They’ve implemented this employee ownership programme in about 50 KKR portfolio companies and they’ve exited about 10. In that process, they say they’ve generated more than $1.6bn for workers. While this idea of employee ownership got its start at KKR, my colleague Antoine Gara, whom you heard at the beginning of the episode, says that it’s picked up some traction among other big firms, too. 

Antoine Gara
The industry itself has sort of begun to really adopt this, and it’s really moving ever more into the mainstream. 

Michela Tindera
Pete Stavros from KKR started a non-profit called Ownership Works. That group’s brought other PE firms on board to evangelise this idea of employee ownership and equity. 

Antoine Gara
In a lot of the largest private equity firms in the industry — you know, from Apollo to Advent — have become supporters of ownership works. And then there are other firms that are doing it their own way. So Blackstone is not a part of ownership works, but it’s starting to implement, you know, very broad-based equity awards across all of the large companies it buys in the US. 

Michela Tindera
So KKR, one of the firms that pioneered private equity’s tough image, is charting a new path, and it seems to be catching on among other major firms.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Coming up, we’ll take a closer look at why this strategy’s expansion is happening at an opportune time for the industry. 

[SWAMP NOTES PODCAST TRAILER PLAYING]

Michela Tindera
It’s important to note that while KKR has been building out this employee ownership programme, private equity on the whole has been undergoing a lot of changes. Antoine says those heavily leveraged buyouts of the 1980s and 90s are mostly a thing of the past. 

Antoine Gara
I mean, back in the 1980s, it seems like there was just a lot more low-hanging fruit for your average private equity investor. The secret sauce hadn’t really gotten out and markets weren’t so efficient. 

Michela Tindera
After the financial crisis, the way private equity structured deals shifted.

Antoine Gara
Post-crisis, it’s been much greater amounts of equity, lower ratios of leverage. In an investment case, that’s much more oriented around growing a business. 

Michela Tindera
The equity programme that KKR is offering plays into this idea of business-building that’s now become a key part of PE’s general strategy. 

Antoine Gara
Now, when you’re doing a buyout, you know, they own companies for five to 10 years and most of the time they’re thinking, how can I double a company’s size? And so they’re much more into business-building now, either using a business to acquire other businesses or figuring out how to grow different business lines or push businesses into new markets all over the world. 

Michela Tindera
But PE firms haven’t only had to change the way they do buyouts in recent years. They’ve also had to change how they present themselves to the world. 

Antoine Gara
Private equity has sort of, you know, morphed from people focused on, you know, deal-by-deal basis to where is their firm going, you know, on a much longer arc of time and how can they continue to build even more broadly into the fabric of the financial system. These firms have grown into large, mainstream financial institutions. They are every bit as powerful as like the largest banks in America now, if not, at times, more powerful.

Michela Tindera
Strategies like offering equity to employees can play a role in softening PE’s image to regulators and lawmakers. 

Antoine Gara
They can go to Washington when these deals work out and they can say, here are, you know, tens of thousands of happy employees in your state or in your industry. They believe in what we’re doing and that really helps you when, you know, Washington is not a place that can be very friendly to private equity oftentimes. 

Michela Tindera
And there is another factor. Business for PE hasn’t exactly been thriving in recent years. Ever since 2022, when interest rates started going up, PE markets have been in a tough place. 

Antoine Gara
I personally think it’s a test that’s not that far off from what they faced during the financial crisis. They are managing balance sheets that . . . the financing costs have increased substantially. And they’ve also not been able to sell many companies either to other private equity firms or to corporations or taking them public. So investors in private equity funds have not gotten a lot of money back and have seen, you know, almost like a historically bad run of cash coming back to them. And it’s come at a time when the public market just keeps going up and up and up. It’s sort of almost a slow-motion crisis, you know, that gets kind of worse and worse year by year. 

Michela Tindera
So if private equity is looking at some tough years ahead, then there’s a business case for rewarding workers. Motivated workers can help a company perform better and boost its value, which is good for the private equity firms that own them. Plus, it doesn’t actually cost the PE firms any cash. 

Antoine Gara
The other interesting component of these employee awards is it’s either given as a restricted stock unit or some form of option, which really has no cash value at the very beginning. 

Michela Tindera
Yeah, when they buy the business, they’re handing employees just like a piece of paper that says: we’ll pay you later. 

Antoine Gara
Right. Yeah. So in the case of someone like a GSI, you know, their annual salary, let’s say, it would have been $80,000 a year or something like that. By giving the contract, and this was done in the format of an option, you know, your typical employee was making a payout. You know, if you worked there for three years of $110,000. So that’s a sum of money that the business wouldn’t have been able to afford on an annual basis or even on a three- or four-year rolling basis. But, you know, as the whole deal was paying out very profitably also for KKR and its investors, that $100,000, you know, across the employees who worked three years longer, that didn’t feel painful to KKR or its investors. 

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Michela Tindera
Of course, workers only get these payouts if deals work out, and that’s not guaranteed. 

Antoine Gara
You know, if a company goes bankrupt, those employees who got the RSU or the equity award or the option, they’re not going to see any money from it. 

Michela Tindera
Pete acknowledges this reality, too. I asked him how KKR would handle that kind of a situation. 

Pete Stavros
It hasn’t happened yet, but it will happen. You know, we invest in lots of companies. I mentioned we’ve got 50 live examples of this and it’s not going to be 50 out of 50 that are home-run investments. It’s just not the way the world works. So that will happen. It hasn’t happened yet. We’re always very upfront and honest with people. This is free to you. You’re not paying for it. It’s not a trade-off for wages or benefits, but it’s also not a guarantee. We have to perform. We got to do our jobs. And if we do, you’ll participate. 

Michela Tindera
For his part, Antoine wonders how valuable the strategy will be for private equity’s investors. 

Antoine Gara
What I’ll be interested to see is, are the companies with the broad equity awards, do they wind up performing as better investments through this tough period than the companies that don’t have it because the incentives were aligned better and so on? But I’ll be interested to see the sort of cohort analysis from firms like KKR. How did firms with equity awards perform as investments versus those that didn’t have them? 

Michela Tindera
Antoine, what’s your take on all this? I mean, is this just some kind of big PR effort from these firms? 

Antoine Gara
This all seems very practical to me, actually. The idea that you’re giving a worker some broad-based incentives and ownership in a company and that that will cause them to think about how to make the company more profitable or find new business opportunities — that just strikes me as common sense. It’s also not a huge breakthrough in capitalism. There are a lot of tech companies, the Facebooks and Googles of the world, that in their earliest days really incentivised most of their employees, mostly with stock awards and pieces of ownership in their companies because they didn’t have that much cash to just give away with high salaries. So, you know, I almost wonder why didn’t this all happen sooner? 

Michela Tindera
Now, you might be thinking about what happens next for those workers at GSI. After all, KKR sold the company to new owners. 

Antoine Gara
So KKR is selling GSI to another private equity firm, Leonard Green & Partners, another longtime private equity firm that’s also a part of Ownership Works. So what’s interesting is Leonard Green will create a whole new set of equity awards for GSI employees. And it shows that there can actually be a recurring incentive structure and that, you know, as companies change hands between private equity firms, you know, these equity awards can be fairly consistent. 

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Michela Tindera
Behind the Money is hosted by me, Michela Tindera. Saffeya Ahmed is our producer. Sound design and mixing by Sam Giovinco. Special thanks to Mischa Frankl-Duval. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer. Cheryl Brumley is the global head of audio. Original music is by Hannis Brown. Thanks for listening. See you next week.

The excavation of Lothal revealed a lot about the port building capability of the people of the Indus Valley Civilisation. Seventy years ago experts from the archaeological survey of India excavated the site of Lothal and they found vessels and tools that revealed a lot about about that time. The Indus Valley people had built the earliest dock in the world where ships could dock and also be repaired. That was indeed a mind blowing discovery. It also spoke about the people’s ability to sail to distant lands through the sea. This skill also helped our people to travel to distant lands by sea for trade. Shantanu Thakur, (Minister of State) Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways made these observations during the closing address of the the THE WEEK Maritime Conclave 2024 in Chennai. 

He said that under PM Modi the world is listening to India with rapt attention and everyone is looking at our country with new hope and discussing the possibilities and opportunities in different fields. The Maritime Mission launched by PM Modi 2022 is aimed at making India a maritime giant. The government is partnering with the public and private sector in creating a modern infrastructure for the best maritime industry in the world. 

He mentioned about PM Modi’s launching different infrastructure projects in Kochi a few months back. Thakur said that it will help not only big vessels to dock but will also reduce India’s dependence on foreign countries due to ship repair work in India that will in turn help save foreign exchange. “I come from West Bengal and hope that the ship building sector in our area is developed. I would like to request all different stake holders to develop mega ship building sector in that region,” said Thakur. 

He congratulated THE WEEK for organising the conclave as different varied subjects in maritime segment were discussed during the conclave. “Our ministry is determined to make the Indian Maritime Economy a world class opportunity for both the public and the private sector. The ministry has already has put in place certain best processes in the world in this sector,” Thakur remarked. 

You remind readers that Sir Keir Starmer said the NHS must improve the way it works before it gets more funding (Report, November 4). The bumper settlement for the Department of Health has inspired much hope, but we hear depressing reports that much of it has already been spent meeting day-to-day pressures.

People won’t forgive the government if promises made to patients during the election aren’t kept. Take osteoporosis sufferers, for example, where two in three patients are denied vital bone medication because basic diagnostic services are missing in half of all trusts.

The result for fracture patients has been a revolving door of admission, discharge and readmission costing the system eye-watering amounts, when safe, effective preventative drugs cost as little as £12 per year for every patient.

We need Wes Streeting, the health secretary, to stay firm that new money needs to fund diagnostics, tests and other preventative measures. Otherwise, no amount of money will be enough and the NHS will continue sleepwalking off a cliff.

Craig Jones
Chief Executive, Royal Osteoporosis Society, Bath, Somerset, UK