In September 2020, K. Vaidyanathan and K. Ramakrishnan became the buyers in a transaction involving the business they had founded. TAKE Solutions approved the sale of its entire 58% stake in APA Engineering to the two promoters for ₹17.4 crore. Twenty years after APA began, its founders were buying that holding themselves. Entrepreneurship occasionally comes with a second opening night.
The deal gives Vaidyanathan’s career a useful centre of gravity. He is APA’s co-founder, director and CEO, an IIT Madras mechanical engineering graduate whose earlier working life included Tata Motors and the Amalgamations Group. His business concerns the many tasks that sit between an automotive component being imagined, made, bought and sold. These tasks are seldom the glamorous part of the car business. They do, however, have a habit of becoming urgent.
There is another version of him away from the transaction: the schoolboy who played state-level table tennis, the tennis player, the long-distance runner. And there is the alumnus who returns to speak about entrepreneurship. The business biography and the sporting biography share a calendar, though neither needs to be turned into a convenient explanation for the other.
The founders return to the buyer’s side
APA started in 2000 with global sourcing services for automotive components. Its initial work covered finding and managing suppliers, procurement, inspection and logistics. Vaidyanathan and Ramakrishnan had both begun their careers in automotive and related businesses. They built their venture around work they already knew, serving an industry in which a purchase involves considerably more than agreeing a price.
By the time of the management buyout, APA operated across engineering, sourcing, compliance and technology. The September 2020 announcement named both buyers as founders and whole-time directors. That detail matters: the purchasers already worked inside the company. The transaction joined executive responsibility with the acquisition of the departing parent’s majority holding.
The buyers: APA promoters K. Vaidyanathan and K. Ramakrishnan. The amount relates to the stake sold.
By the end of the 2020-21 financial year, the sale was complete. The transaction also resulted in TAKE’s disinvestment from APA Engineering’s Singapore and US subsidiaries. The ownership change therefore concerned an international business, with operations extending beyond the original Indian company. The transaction price describes that particular stake; it should be read with that precise boundary around it.
A founder’s career is often narrated through an exit. Here, one of the significant dates is a purchase. The same two names appear as operators and buyers. That makes the 2020 chapter especially useful for understanding Vaidyanathan: he belongs to the continuing management story of APA as well as to its beginnings.
A mechanical engineer learns the other half of the business
Vaidyanathan graduated from IIT Madras in mechanical engineering in 1985. He also holds an MBA from Loyola. Together, the qualifications sit comfortably beside his later work in international marketing and sourcing for light engineering. A manufactured component has an engineering life and a commercial life, and his career has involved both.
Before APA, he worked at Tata Motors and the Amalgamations Group; his previous employers also include India Pistons. Those are concrete industrial roots for a company that began by helping overseas customers source automotive components. His background links the business to vehicles and their constituent parts, with international marketing and sourcing adding the customer-facing dimension.
Ramakrishnan brought a different, complementary set of experience. He had worked at Tata Motors and had been director of ALCASTE, an aluminium casting company involved in pressure die casting, gravity casting and CNC machining. At APA he serves as director and COO. Their partnership puts two automotive careers beside one another, with manufacturing and operations particularly visible in Ramakrishnan’s background.
The sporting coincidence is rather pleasing. Both founders were competitive table tennis players: Vaidyanathan at state level during school, Ramakrishnan nationally ranked. It would be tempting to invent their first match. The actual coincidence is quite enough. A boardroom containing two people accustomed to a fast return requires no literary assistance.
The work between a part and a customer
APA’s expansion followed several forms of customer work. Internal software tools became products through its technology division. Cataloging and data services supported automotive aftermarket customers, while ecommerce services addressed online selling. Engineering services added product design, development and benchmarking. Regulatory compliance became another division. The founders developed these activities to meet customer needs, broadening a relationship that had begun in sourcing into several kinds of specialist work.
Consider the range implied by those activities. A drawing, a supplier inspection, a catalog entry and a regulatory submission belong to different disciplines, yet can concern the same product. That is the setting in which Vaidyanathan’s company operates. Engineering provides the object; commercial and information work help it travel through the business. The neatly finished part can still have an untidy administrative life.
The founders describe their original ambition plainly: “We believed that there is immense potential to improve efficiencies in the automotive components industry.” It is a joint statement, and its plural deserves to remain intact. APA’s origin belongs to a partnership. The sentence also supplies a more specific starting point than a general enthusiasm for entrepreneurship: a particular industry, and work within it that could be improved.
A founder’s significant date can be a purchase.
On the 2020 management buyout
A customer visit, with the human details left in
On 11 November 2022, Vaidyanathan and Ramakrishnan welcomed Phil Hekman, managing director of GPC Global Sourcing, on his last official visit to APA. They presented him with a memento and an APA T-shirt. The photograph is a modest business scene: three people, a meeting room, a token of a relationship. It is also a welcome interruption to the language of divisions and transactions.
The T-shirt does some useful narrative work. International sourcing can sound like an arrangement between abstract entities. Here it has people, a room and a gift that must eventually be folded. The documented visit makes visible a personal encounter inside a business whose work extends across borders.
A later announcement placed Vaidyanathan alongside Rajeshkanna Venkatasamy, APA’s vice president for sourcing, in the company’s plans for AAPEX 2025 in Las Vegas. The dates were 4-6 November, with booths A1235 and A1236. It is a specific public example of the CEO’s customer-facing role, alongside another member of the sourcing leadership. The invitation covered the same broad mix of technology, engineering, compliance and sourcing.
Back to the classroom, this time at the front
Vaidyanathan’s connection with engineering education continued after his own graduation. On 28 March 2013, he was the speaker for a session at the institute titled What is Entrepreneurship? It is an apt question for someone who had moved from industrial employment to founding a business, and who would later participate in its management buyout.
There were other teaching encounters. On 18 August 2016, Vaidyanathan was among the speakers at PALS Theory to Practice lectures at Rajalakshmi Engineering College, an event attended by engineering students. His speaking activities have also included guest appearances in personality development programmes. The recurring activity is concrete: appearing before students and audiences to speak, alongside running the company.
APA’s education work includes support for Merit Core and economically disadvantaged students at the College of Engineering, Anna University, in Chennai. The assistance includes college fees, hostel and examination expenses, laptops and books. In July 2024, the partnership also supported a new classroom. Both Vaidyanathan and Ramakrishnan are involved in this education partnership. Ramakrishnan also serves on the programme’s board, bringing the COO into its formal oversight as well as the company’s support.
Fees, books and a classroom are satisfyingly tangible things. They bring this part of the story back to what students need to continue their education. For a profile that begins with a stake purchase, it is useful to arrive at another kind of expenditure: support directed towards the next group of engineering students.
There is still a game to play
Vaidyanathan’s public life also includes Rotary service. He has been president of the Rotary Club of Madras Down Town and served as an assistant governor in 2011-12. Alongside company leadership and speaking engagements, these roles give his biography a community dimension, with named responsibilities and a period of service alongside the continuing work at APA. His activities in Rotary and in education occupy a different setting from his company’s customer meetings, but they belong to the same public career.
His sporting interests have changed form over the years. The school table tennis player represented Tamil Nadu; his later sporting activities include tennis and long-distance running. The details make room for a person beyond a title. A CEO can be introduced through an acquisition, but a life also contains the next court booking and the next stretch of road.
Vaidyanathan’s career has an unusual double beginning: the founding of APA in 2000 and the purchase, with his co-founder, of TAKE’s holding two decades later. Between and around those dates are factory experience, international sourcing, students, customers and sport. The story continues through the ordinary obligations of the enterprise he still leads. The second opening night, after all, still requires someone to turn up for work.