Beginning with one truck in a one-room office, he constructed a Rs 2,000 crore turnover combination

At age 22, back in 1982, Ajay Singhal began a vehicle business alongside an uncle with a solitary truck from a one-room office in Punjabi Bagh, Delhi. The pair put Rs 1.2 lakh in the association firm and got their most memorable huge client, Maruti Suzuki, in 1983. In the following forty years, Ajay Singhal has developed and fabricated Om Operations Gathering, which utilizes in excess of 5,000 individuals and claims north of 5,000 trucks with a yearly turnover of Rs 2,000 crore in FY 2020-21.

At age 22, back in 1982, Ajay Singhal started a transport business along with an uncle with a single truck from a one-room office in Punjabi Bagh, Delhi. In the next four decades, Ajay Singhal has grown and built Om Logistics Group, which employs more than 5,000 people and owns over 5,000 trucks with an annual turnover of Rs 2,000 crore in FY 2020-21.

The group is majorly in the automobile logistics and warehousing business and rode on the wave of the Indian automobile industry boom that began with the entry of Maruti in 1981. From the early days, Ajay swam with the tide, embracing new technologies and introducing innovations that helped him become a market leader.

We built the first truck in the country that could transport five cars, stacked in two rows one above the other,” says Ajay, a pre-engineering diploma holder from Rohtak Government College. Today, we can transport up to nine cars in a single-trailer truck. Ajay did not pursue his engineering degree after his diploma but joined an uncle to start a radio parts manufacturing factory in Wazirabad on the outskirts of Delhi when he was just 18 years old.

“We started with Rs 3,000 and ran the business for four years. We later sold the business for Rs 60,000,” says Ajay, who then joined with another uncle to start the transport business. In the initial years he was very hands-on and worked on every aspect of the logistics business, and minutely took care of every step, be it booking of freight, billing, and ensuring punctuality and timely delivery of services.

“Maruti got impressed by our commitment and became our future partner and played a pivotal role in my growth,” says Ajay, who continued to improvise and rebuild trucks to suit market needs. “We could make a truck that was available in the international market for Rs 20 lakh with Rs 2 lakh using indigenous technology. “We took 15 trucks each and split. In 1993, it became Om Logistics (unlisted) Limited,” says Ajay.

The same year, he hooked up with Bajaj scooters, which gave a further boost to his business. We took care of the supply of parts to the manufacturing units and arranged the air freight and other logistics,” says Ajay. By 1997, they started offering warehouses for storing manufacturing parts for Maruti.

The land bought for a few lakhs of rupees is worth many crores today, says Ajay. After Maruti and Bajaj, they also onboarded Tata and by 2002 their turnover touched Rs 100 crore. The company offered fixed travel allowances to drivers and provided good toilets for them at their branch offices (which are currently located in about 600 places around the country).

“We also welcomed technology and gave pagers to drivers when they came, and also installed GPS in trucks.” Raghav Singhal, Ajay’s son, a BBA graduate who joined the business a couple of years ago, is proud of the company’s tradition of treating its employees like family and is determined to follow in his father’s footsteps.

“An employee who joined us at a salary of Rs 1,000 in 1983 is still with us and takes home a salary of more than Rs 5 lakh today as the all-India Operations Head,” says Raghav. We were doing international freight, bulk loading, warehousing, rail freight, air freight, and door-to-door cargo service,” says Ajay.

Ajay reminisces about his good old days, “In 1979 I bought a Bajaj scooter, and it gave me unmatched happiness, the kind of which I don’t get even when I move around in a Range Rover today.” And such are the simple joys of life.

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