The immigrant phone card seller making the Bollywood movie you have to see

www.forbes.com: At the age of 17, Allirajah Subaskaran came to Europe to escape war-torn Sri Lanka, helping out at his family’s Paris restaurant and then at its corner shop.

Now Lyca Productions, part of his Lycamobile telecommunications and media group, is making 2.0, a science fiction film starring Rajinikanth, Akshay Kumar and Amy Jackson.

Directed by Shanmugam Shankar, the highest-paid movie director in India and promoted under the banner ‘The World Is Not Only For Humans’, it claims to be a spiritual successor to 2010’s Enthiran [‘Robot’].

2.0 is scheduled for release in October and, despite the collapse of talks for Arnold Schwarzenegger to take the star role for record Indian remuneration, it remains Bollywood’s most hotly-anticipated movie of 2017 as well as the most expensive film in Indian history.

It’s the sort of story that could be the subject of a Bollywood or Hollywood movie itself. Yet, Subaskaran’s creation of a billion dollar-revenue multinational company is no work of fiction.

Rags to riches

After arriving in Paris, the family discovered that pre-paid international phone cards for immigrants like themselves to call home were among the corner shop’s best-selling products.

When its distributor of the cards moved on to something else, the family took up the distribution rights and started selling the cards to other shops as well as through its own.

That led to a move into overseas markets including most of Europe, the UK and the US. Then Subaskaran moved to the UK and in 2002 formed Lycatel, named after his sister Leka.

That business still sells calling cards to wholesalers who then sell them on to the public. But it is now a tiny part of the business.

In 2006, Subaskaran founded Lycamobile, a mobile virtual network operator that initially focused on the Dutch market. Now Lycamobile is headquartered in London, buying domestic and international telecoms capacity from larger groups and selling call packages on Sim cards.

The group’s best-known business, it has 15 million customers in 21 countries, competing with large mobile telecom groups as well as other mobile virtual network operators such as Virgin Mobile, Lebara and Giffgaff.

“We started with calling cards but the technology developed,” says Subaskaran. “We saw the opportunity to get the best price for network access.

“Now the mobile virtual network operator market has changed but we see lots of room to grow. There are many more countries for us to launch in. We have a pipeline of ten more countries to launch in this year, from Russia to Uganda, Turkey, Mexico and South Africa.”

However, the wider group’s scope is much more diverse, spanning businesses including West African airline Lyca Airways, pre-paid debit card provider Lycamoney, online travel agency LycaFly, LycaRadio, LycaTV and Lyca Productions.

Lycamobile chairman Subaskaran, who still controls the privately-owned business, has even bought two restaurants near the company’s headquarters in London’s Docklands and has plans to get involved in property development.

Sense of purpose

For Subaskaran, 44, the company’s sense of purpose is closely linked to his personal history, with its focus shaped by the way the business developed.

“I’m from a working class family with one elder brother and a younger sister and I lost my father at the age of ten,” he told me in a recent interview.

“My mum brought us up alone after that. It’s all about family and belonging for us. That’s how we started; that’s what we’re about. We have 8,000 staff and we encourage people to bring their families to work for us. “We see the company as one big family. It’s about connecting; it’s about being in touch and being real. That defines how we behave and everything we do.” That also drives Subaskaran’s philanthropy, delivered through the Gnanam Foundation, set up with his mother Gnanambikai in 2010 to provide care for marginalized communities and people abandoned without care. The foundation focuses on providing opportunities for people to learn how to develop skills to support themselves.

As for Lycamobile, Subaskaran believes that the biggest market opportunities have still to open up. India is probably the largest market that Subaskaran hopes to enter soon.

China will take longer, however. “We are not yet in China,” says Subaskaran. “We’re talking to them but the market has not opened up yet.

“It’s dependent on the regulators in a lot of countries. But they’re moving towards it. Wherever regulators open the market, Lyca wants to be there. Our target is to have 50M active subscribers by 2020.”