CxO of the Week: Mr Rahul Garg, CEO and Founder, Moglix

A tech enthusiast with extensive experience in strategy, product management, and operations in the technology industry, Rahul Garg is the CEO and Founder of, Moglix. Moglix, a fast-growing supply chain startup helps companies with digital supply chain transformation. On CxO of the Week, with CiOL, we talk to Mr Rahul Garg. An alumnus of IIT Kanpur and Indian School of Business (ISB) Hyderabad, Rahul holds 16 US patents in the domain of product management and technology. He has also received several awards and accolades from leading industry platforms like the Fortune 40 under 40 and the BW Young Entrepreneur Award 2018 for his contribution to the space of digital transformation and supply chain.

In conversation with CiOL, on CxO of the Week, we explore the industry with Mr Rahul. With his prior experience at Google in Advertising, and now managing Moglix, Rahul has proven himself a thought leader in the space of automation in the manufacturing industry. He has come a long way, and here, we talk to him about some important pointers wrt the industry.

How has Covid19 affected your business? Has it increased or decreased your revenue?

Moglix is a digital native that has been built from the ground up on the cloud platform. Being digital by design in the supply chain domain allowed us to tide over the first 5 months of intense lockdowns. We were able to keep the supply chain up and running both for ourselves and our enterprise customers. We were able to turnaround our supply chain within 3 days of downtime; thanks to our business model configuration and digital network configuration. As the year progressed, we also surpassed our previous business volume as the trend of offline to online became stronger. Further, now, we are on track to achieve a 2-3 plus times growth in our revenue streams in the short-term.

The COVID19 vaccine rollout in India has started. How do you look at the trajectory of economic recovery?

We have done well to cross 15 million doses of vaccine within the first 2 months of inception. Maintaining agility and consistency over the intermediate term of the next 18-24 months will enable each local geography at the village/tehsil level to reach herd immunity faster and set the tone for a faster economic rebound. India is a global leader in vaccine manufacturing. our COVID19 vaccine distribution to our global partners will, thus, determine our position as a global pharmaceutical manufacturing hub. It will also pivot our healthcare sector to achieving self-reliance in the long term.

The Union Budget 2021 is here. What opportunities do you see it creating Indian manufacturing?

The government is focusing on pump-priming in the short run and maintaining fiscal prudence in the long run. However, the COVID19 pandemic being a truly global phenomenon it was important to craft a coordinated policy response to affect a quick rebound as well as reconfigure the global manufacturing supply chain. On these accounts, the Union Budget 2021 has struck the right notes on infrastructure creation, unlocking demand, and also generating employment in the core sectors of the economy. The decision to invest INR 111 lakh crore in the National Infrastructure Pipeline will have positive ripple effects on core sectors in manufacturing like metals & mining, cement, logistics, and automotive. Once built, the National Infrastructure Pipeline will be the lifeline of India’s domestic and global trade in manufacturing.

Being a pioneer of supply chain digitization in India, how do you expect enterprises to adjust their CAPEX on digital transformation projects from here?

The delta between offline and digital supply chain ecosystems in manufacturing has widened through the pandemic. The gulf will widen even further with enterprises looking to implement the learning outcomes of the transient phase of the pandemic. IT spending is projected to grow to 6% in 2021. Large enterprises are searching for digital solutions to build their supply chain network for the future. As such CAPEX on large-scale digital transformation projects will pick up; as we continue to rebound in terms of economic growth.

A large proportion of this increased CAPEX will go to business applications based on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotic process automation. They are essential to deploying business continuity management systems. We also see this trend rising in sectors like manufacturing, supply chain, B2B e-commerce, logistics, BFSI, pharmaceuticals, and grocery retail.

Does Moglix have plans to pursue any new vertical or geography in 2021?

We have continued to add new product categories, geographies, and also verticals to our digital supply chain solutions portfolio. Responding to the demands of the manufacturing sector, we recently integrated Goa and Assam into our pan-India supply chain. We have also entered the United Kingdom. Now, we aim to expand the network of suppliers and customers in the country and across the European Union. We had strengthened the PPE supply chain there in the post-BREXIT scenario.

In India, we have also been collaborating with engineering, procurement, and construction enterprises. Now we look forward to establishing ourselves as a key supply chain partner in the vertical of infrastructure and manufacturing-as-a-service. We have been approached by many leading suppliers in our ecosystem. They want us to enable them with solutions to tide over their short-term working capital and liquidity challenges. As such, we have also recently plugged into the supply chain financing vertical with a digitally enabled collateral-free supplier credit platform ‘Credlix’ exclusively for our 15000+ suppliers. Further, we have created an INR 1000 crore-corpus that we will leverage over the next 12 months to this effect.

For the previous CxO of the Week, read here.

Signup for our Newsletter>