India’s Gen Z Billionaires Are Bored With Business
Dynastic scions prefer to pursue their own passions. Private equity is glad to help.
Stepping back: Dilip Piramal, left, at the art gallery bearing his name with an exhibit on Mumbai’s metro.
Photographer: Vijay Bate/Hindustan Times/Getty
The family that ran India’s largest luggage maker for more than half a century is packing it in, with control of Mumbai-based VIP Industries Ltd. passing to private equity. “What do I do?” Dilip Piramal, the 75-year-old chairman, wondered aloud in a TV interview after announcing the sale. “The younger generation is not interested in management.”
Piramal isn’t the only aging businessperson to have run out of successors: “Today among the scions of some of the most affluent families of India, someone is an artist, someone wants to be a sportsman, someone wants to run a small restaurant. There’s nothing wrong in that. It’s the modern trend, people want to do their own things.”