mumbai today india is the brightest jewel in the 6billion corporations emerging market crown kuoni is a global leader in visa services through vfs whose origin interestingly is from india vfs today accounts for a third of the firms profits on a short visit to india stefan leser kuonis outbound and specialists division ceo talks to toi about why the firm is not gungho on investing in travel portals its strategy to ply along with local brands and how an injury scuttled his dreams of becoming a sports coach excerpts kuoni recently underwent a business restructuring globally where does india figure in the scheme of things we have let gone saturated markets where we had subscale tour activities like in spain italy france and russia but we went out of russia as the market is not structured resulting in a huge cost disadvantage though russia is a growth market we took a call that we should not be there but india is important for us as here you have structures in place and its only a matter of how you take things forward so has the focus shifted from europe to emerging markets some of our businesses in europe are not sub scale like in uk where we have a specialist position or in switzerland where we are a household brand then we have a not so subscale business in the nordics where sun and beach holidays are quite popular we are also active in hong kong and china and here in india where there is potential india is our biggest market among emerging nations the country is also our second biggest in terms of staff strength as we have a large visa services operation vfs here everyone is moving towards the online travel space have you missed the bus we are powering a lot of those planes with content the model adopted by a lot of online players is grow the business and exit im not judging them its a great business but obviously they have a different plan we have been in the industry for 108 years and buying selling businesses is not what we would do naturally we are happy to support those businesses but not keen on taking up positions in them and our online is basically to enable the customer to get an experience but the fulfillment is still at our branches so we prefer a hybrid model kuonis india journey has been dotted with acquisitions whats your branding strategy we are not a company that comes and says from tomorrow everything is kuoni we do have advantages when we use kuoni even if it means cobranding for instance kuonisotc in scandinavia too we have a brand called apollo known for greekstyled beach holidays replacing that brand with kuoni would be suicidal how did you get into the travel industry i wanted to be a sports teacher but got injured during an exam so i had to look for another career and found tourism good