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February - 2002 - issue > Cover Feature
The Maverick
Friday, February 1, 2002
Oddly-named Maverick Tube Corporation is deeply rooted in the heart of the industrial world: the oil business. High-tech lovers often say that silicon, or bandwidth, is “the oil of the 21st century.” Maybe eventually, but for now crude oil is still unquestionably king. And while the “black gold” flows, Maverick Tube is out there hoping to supply as much industrial grade tubing material for oil wells as possible.

On the surface, it’s not a particularly glamorous business: one small but necessary piece in the food chain of a colossal industry, far from the microchips, hedge funds, supply chain software, or other trendy items that always seem to make business headlines.

But for unassuming Sudhakar Kanthamneni, Maverick Tube VP of manufacturing and technology, it’s a way of life. And in this cutthroat industry, rife with competitors like U.S. Steel, and Newport Steel, what he does to enhance the profitability of the engineering and manufacturing process at Maverick is life and death for the 2,200-person company. To achieve success for Maverick, Kanthamneni has to become a maverick in his own right.

“Some people go by the book. We don’t believe in the book,” says Kanthamneni with an obvious love for the intricacies of industrial machinery in his voice. The heavy equipment that Maverick gets from suppliers in Japan, the United States, or Europe, is standard, and available to all of its competitors. It’s Kanthamneni’s job to make it more than that, by redesigning and modifying the standard models, or using prototype equipment, to improve the competitiveness of his manufacturing process.

“We push the equipment to the limit, we like to find out where it breaks,” he says, sounding more like a daredevil racecar driver than a corporate executive.

Kanthamneni had worked in the steel industry for a decade before he made the unlikely decision to join Maverick. Like so many other Indian immigrants, he came to the United States to study, ending up at the University of Iowa and getting his master’s in industrial engineering in 1976. He stayed in Iowa, in the heart of Middle America, and took a job with Donovan Steel and Tube Corp., where he would eventually become VP of engineering.

When he made the unlikely decision to join St. Louis, Missouri-based Maverick in 1987, the company was struggling to recover and reorganize, after a troubled past since its start as a small wire and tubing maker in 1977. Maverick had been acquired only to see the company that acquired it file for bankruptcy. The company’s VP of sales had worked with Kanthamneni in the past, and heard that he was planning to switch jobs. He tried to recruit Kanthamneni, and finally convinced him to join. Maverick was going through only 50,000 tons of steel per year at the time, a number that has since grown to over a million tons per year.

But though Kanthamneni was relinquishing his higher profile position to make a bet on this ailing company, Maverick’s board of directors was cautious. According to Kanthamneni, as one of very few Indians around, he was viewed somewhat skeptically. He came on as an engineering manager on somewhat of a trial basis for a few quarters, before it became clear that he deserved the VP of engineering job.

Kanthamneni laughs about the board’s decision to accept him into the company. “They did it,” he says, “but they were worried about it.”

Maverick (NYSE: MVK) went public in 1991, and Kanthamneni admits that constantly having to please an impatient Wall Street in a business with inevitable ups and downs is a serious challenge. But his passion lies with the engineering itself.

The risky bet that Kanthamneni made when he joined Maverick in 1987 has obviously paid off. He has lived his own brand of entrepreneurship, taking a relatively unchanging product and shaping its production through passionate engineering to create commercial success.

Unglamorous perhaps. But less exciting, not a bit. Kanthamneni is one of the few who decided not to jump ship from a traditional engineering field to computer engineering, like hundreds of his peers did. Selecting an engineering field when admitted to any top engineering school in India as an undergraduate is driven by the candidate’s ‘ranking’ in entrance exams. In the last 20 years or so, computer engineering is hallowed ground. Kanthamneni, and other siliconindians like him, are following their heart, capabilities and luck, and reaching the pinnacle of their fields.

“Whatever needs to be done will be done,” he affirms. For now Kanthamneni is hoping that increased oil consumption in Asia continues, that OPEC behaves itself and that the United States has a cold winter to push up oil and gas consumption. si

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