Shares of Coffee Day Enterprises Ltd plunged 20% on Tuesday, July 30, after the company’s founder VG Siddhartha went missing on Monday evening. The Dakshina Kannada police have now launched a massive search operation to locate him.
According to reports, Siddhartha got off from his car near a bridge across the Nethravathi River near Mangalore, about 375km from Bengaluru, but did not return even after an hour. A panicked driver went down looking for him, but could not find him anywhere. He then alerted the family members who in turn informed the police.
At 9.19 am, Coffee Day Enterprises shares were locked in a 20% lower circuit at Rs 153.40. The stock, as of its Monday’s closing price, has corrected nearly 27% in the last one year.
Siddhartha, CCD founder and the owner of Asia’s single-largest coffee estate, who is also the son-in-law of former Karnataka chief minister SM Krishna, was recently in news when he sold his entire 20.41% stake in Mindtree to Larsen and Toubro Ltd (L&T) for around Rs 3,269 crore to clear his debts. Reportedly, he had earned a profit of around Rs 2,858 crore from this transaction. The deal paved way for L&T to aggressively take over Mindtree later and gain complete control over the firm.
Siddhartha’s companies employ around 30,000 people across India. The 58-year-old entrepreneur is known more as the founder promoter of Cafe Coffee Day, but before all this, he was an investment banker and trader.
Siddhartha, who was born in Karnataka’s Chikkamagaluru, started his career as a management trainee trading in Indian stock market at JM Financial after completing his masters’ degree in Mangalore University in Mumbai.
He later bought Sivan Securities in 1984 and turned it into a highly successful investment banking and stock broking company. It was renamed to Way2Wealth Securities in 2000.
It was only in 1992, that Siddhartha started his coffee business Amalgamated Bean Company Trading (now called Coffee Day Global), an integrated coffee business which ranges from procuring, processing and roasting coffee beans to retailing of coffee products. The company’s revenue stood at Rs 2,016 crore for FY18.
After the success of coffee, Siddhartha launched India’s first coffee café — Café Coffee Day — on Brigade Road, Bengaluru in 1996. Since then, the company has grown to be one of the largest café chains in the country with 1,751 outlets in 250 cities. The company has outlets outside India as well.