Hey guys,
I came across a very interesting article from The peninsula titled “Indian IT firms moving up value ladder“. We have discussed here already about Asian markets, but things seem to be speeding-up in the last years. More precisely, India has become the second fastest expanding country in the world, only after China.
As Internet became a costless solution for western firms to outsource call-centers and payroll services, Indian companies started to take advantage of that. Offering low prices, they started to gain market share in a competitive worldwide environment. With this increasing revenue, they have highly invested in two basic areas to ensure a sustainable growth in India: infrastructure and education.
Infrastructure
Let’s assume it, India has been a poor country for many years, and although things are changing, changes take time. More than 1 Billion Indians, living in a country which is one-third of the US and working really hard are making this change possible.
To climb the ladder of success and reach the first-class-economy step, we need a efficient supply of energy, we need roads and transportation, seaports, we need a telecommunications infrastructure to develop communications. And all that is going to cost more than 25 Billion USD in the next 5 years.
As Finance Minister P. Chidambaram said in an interview with India daily recently:
“The new proposal for the federal budget includes major spending on big-ticket infrastructure items like highways, metro rail networks, ports, airports, power and telecommunications.
The importance of infrastructure for rapid economic development cannot be overstated. The most glaring deficit in India is the infrastructure deficit.“
If you still have doubts, you should check out “Bangalore” on your google news. There is a nice project called NanoCity, and that’s just the start.
Education
As it happened with the payroll and call-centers service that we commented before, India has developed an incredibly successful network of Business and IT schools, that offer a top-tier education at a much lower price.
The fact that Indians can usually speak English, specially in international cities -Bombai, Bangalore, Delhi,…- has been a decisive factor for the international expansion of the Indian education worldwide.
MBA programmes, such as Insead, started to focus on Singapore as an extra campus, but I think the tendency to have asian campuses will raise in the next few years. There exists a big -and increasing- market of executives and MBA candidates, who are willing to be a “bridge between asia-europe/asia-america“.
Although the Indian MBA programmes are still not fully recognized in the international environment, there are lots of candidate schools pushing hard to be a reference. In the top 5 Business Schools in Asia, 2 of them are already Indian [ranking].
You can pay your 60,000€ for the Insead program, or you can pay Rs. 2,000,000 (~34,000€) at the Indian Institute for Management Ahmedabad. Expensive both, but I think a 50% difference is worth mentioning.
To conclude, I would say that if Gandhi would be a consultant these days, he would say something like this:
“We believe in Ahimsa, but we are going to fight hard to increase our market share in every single sector world-wide and become number one.”
Have a Great Day!
Fer