A little more about Atul Punj

A little more about Atul Punj

His second generation moved into manufacturing truck bodies, industrial insulation materials and air conditioners (in partnership with Fedders Corp.).

He bid to construct a 100-mile oil pipeline between Mumbai and Pune for state-owned Hindustan Petroleum. The pipeline was eventually completed two years later but had racked up losses that the group could ill afford. He got its first overseas break as a sub-contractor to PT Trihasra Bimanusa Tunggal, an Indonesian firm with Suharto family ties that had the contract to build a 130-mile pipeline for Pertamina, the state-owned petroleum firm.

Raising a bank guarantee for $2.6 million (20% of the total contract amount of $13 million) was a nightmare as he couldn't provide any security collateral. The banks he approached showed him the door. Ten days short of the deadline a banker at ICICI Bank agreed to provide the guarantee, accepting Atul's word as collateral. Punj executed the Indonesian project six months ahead of schedule, making enough money to wipe out its accumulated losses. "That's when our journey really started," says Atul

Great People do commit mistakes
However, hubris led Atul into another misstep. While building a fiber-optic network for telecom firm Bharti Airtel, he latched on to Internet services, which were just taking off in India. Atul admits that he was lured by the prospect of making a quick buck. Borrowing $50 million from ICICI Bank in 1999, an amount equivalent to Punj Lloyd's revenues that year, he set up Spectranet, an ISP.

A mistake of evaluation
January 2000 Nomura Securities offered to buy Spectranet for $350 million, boosting its offer to $550 million in August. Atul was set to make a killing, but a month later the technology bubble burst and Nomura backed out of the deal.

I was with Punj Lloyd at this time
Punj was once more on the brink. "We'd run out of cash and were leveraged to the hilt. Through it all, Atul kept smiling so we never felt that we were going under," recalls Luv Chhabra, Punj Lloyd's director of corporate affairs.

And .........The rest is History

Regrouping, Atul turned his attention back to construction. Again luck and timing worked in his favor as markets like Kazakhstan and Libya opened up, drawing in the world's oil majors. Punj Lloyd made early inroads into those countries, initially securing modest contracts as a subcontractor to big firms like Bechtel and Kellogg Brown & Root (nyse: HAL - news - people ) (now KBR). "Today we can compete with the global majors," says managing director Vimal Kaushik, a 38-year Punj veteran.

In a bid to unlink Punj from the notoriously volatile energy sector, Atul has expanded into infrastructure, a crying need in India. Punj has built highways, ports and elevated railroads. In June it forged a partnership with Singapore Technologies Kinetics to make defense equipment.

Atul has set a tall target for Punj: to be among the top five engineering and construction firms by 2012 in the markets in which it operates. (It now is only a fourth the size of Larsen & Toubro.) Age seems to have tempered him a bit, though. "We've had some serious tailwind behind us in recent years, but this is a real stretch goal," he acknowledges. "So when I come to the office every morning, I try to remind myself: This is your first day on the job."