French luxury brand LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE, or LVMH, is interested in working with yoga guru Ramdev and buy a stake in his Patanjali Ayurved, The Economic Times reported.
L Catterton, a private equity fund co-owned by LVMH, said it will spend almost half of its remaining Asia fund – $500 million (around Rs 3,185 crore) – to buy a stake in Patanjali.
“I know his [Ramdev] model is not to work with multinationals and with foreign money,” Ravi Thakran, managing partner, L Catterton Asia, told The Economic Times. “We would love to work with him if we can find a model,” he said.
The deal may not go through as Ramdev has positioned his products and the company, through advertisements, as being anti-multinational.
Thakran said Patanjali was a “disruptor” in its category. “It has taken Indianness and celebrated it with pride,” Thakran told the newspaper. Thakran said that a tie-up could help Patanjali sell its products in the United States, Japan, China, South Korea and Europe.
Patanjali’s spokesperson SK Gupta Tijarawala said on Twitter that Patanjali will not “hesitate to use foreign funds for the benefit of our country”.
“Acharya Balkrishna [Patanjali’s chief executive] has said just as we use foreign technology for our development, we do not hesitate to use foreign funds for the benefit of our country, but we will take it on our own terms, we will not give share/stake,” Tijarawala said on Twitter.
Balkrishna told the daily that while the company needed Rs 5,000 crore in loans in “Indian currency” at rates lower than offered by banks, he was not willing to “give stake to anyone”.
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