MSME Briefing Bureau:

How a 1788 trading house kept finding its next business for 200+ years

What if one of the oldest growth lessons in Indian business did not begin with a strategy document—but with a problem that needed solving?

Thomas Parry arrived in Madras in 1788 as a merchant. He did not have an MBA, a strategy consultancy or a five-year growth plan. He had something more useful: the instinct to follow an opportunity when it appeared.

That habit would become a defining characteristic of the institution that eventually carried his name.

The clue was in the problem

The most revealing example came at Ranipet, much later in Parry’s history.

Parry acquired a bone mill there. Its original business was to process bones into material for the gelatine industry. But the process left finer particles of bone for which there was no obvious market.

The company did not simply discard them.

It found that these particles could be sold as bonemeal. And that opened another door: fertilisers.

The chain is remarkably simple:

Bone mill → bonemeal → fertilisers → chemicals.

By 1906, the Presidency Manure Works was manufacturing superphosphate and sulphuric acid at Ranipet.

But then another problem appeared.

Sulphuric acid is difficult to store and transport, and suitable jars became increasingly difficult to obtain. So in 1908, Parry began making its own acid jars.

That became a ceramics business.

Eventually, those ceramics moved far beyond industrial jars into a much broader range of products, ultimately becoming associated with Parryware.

This is the part of Parry’s history worth studying.

The next business was often hiding inside the previous business.

Not diversification. Adjacency.

Look at the broader trajectory.

In 1842, Parry entered industrial sugar production. The company then added distilling as an extension of its sugar operations.

Much later, the move into fertilisers did not emerge from nowhere. It grew out of an existing industrial operation and agricultural connection.

Then came chemicals, followed by ceramics because the chemical business created a requirement for specialised containers.

In 1914, Parry moved into confectionery. In 1918, engineering. In 1952, vitreous sanitaryware. In 1961, E.I.D.-Parry played a leading role in promoting Coromandel Fertilisers.

Seen individually, these look like a long list of unrelated businesses.

Seen as a sequence, something else emerges.

Parry kept carrying capabilities forward.

A customer relationship.
A manufacturing process.
A distribution network.
An industrial skill.
A raw material.
A market insight.

One capability created the possibility for another.

This is what makes the story strategically interesting

Modern management has names for these moves.

Backward integration means moving closer to the inputs you depend upon.

Forward integration means moving closer to the customer.

Adjacent diversification means entering a related business where existing capabilities give you an advantage.

Parry’s history contains elements of all three.

But there is an important difference between the way we describe it today and the way it appears to have unfolded then.

There is little evidence that Parry was sitting around in 1906 asking:

“Which industries should we enter over the next decade?”

The evidence shows something more practical.

A problem appeared. They investigated it. A solution created a product. The product exposed another market. The new market required another capability. They built that capability.

And then the process started again.

That is strategy emerging from operations.

Why this can create institutional resilience

Every successful adjacency adds something to the organisation.

Knowledge compounds.

So does manufacturing expertise.

So do supplier relationships, distribution, capital, customer understanding and managerial experience.

The next venture therefore does not start from zero.

This helps explain why Parry could keep changing its portfolio across radically different economic periods. EID Parry itself describes diversification as an important contributor to its long-term sustainability, noting that the business diversified more than a century before diversification became a standard management practice.

But diversification alone is not the lesson.

Disciplined adjacency is.

There is a world of difference between entering a new industry because it looks fashionable and entering one because your existing business has already given you an unfair advantage there.

The question for today’s founder

This is where Parry’s history becomes useful far beyond history.

Look at your own operation.

What problem keeps costing you money?

What does your customer repeatedly ask you for?

What capability have you built that competitors outside your industry might value?

What are you buying today that you could eventually make?

What are you making that could serve another market?

Your next growth opportunity may not be somewhere on the horizon. It may already be sitting inside your current business.

That does not mean every operational problem should become a new venture.

It means founders should learn to distinguish between a distraction and an adjacency.

Parry’s remarkable story was not that it predicted every future market.

It was that, again and again, it noticed where the next opportunity was emerging from the business it already had.

For Indian founders and executives, that may be the more useful growth playbook.

Don’t ask only, “What business should we enter next?”

Ask:

“What has our current business already taught us that we could build next?”

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