Time To Go Global

A LOT HAS BEEN SAID about the sanctions that India has faced thanks to Donald J Trump’s ego and his enduring stupidity. But I’ve always believed that India and Indians are great at spotting opportunities in adversity. And I believe there is no better time than now for India and Indian industry to recalibrate all that it has done. Let’s start from the beginning.

Indian industry has always been more lazy than one can imagine.

During the licence raj, Indian industry went out of its way to ensure competition was blocked, to make sure that licences were seized upon thanks to political favouritism and crony capitalism. When the free market arrived, people as eminent as Rahul Bajaj said, “Oh, we must create the Bombay Club.” I remember a time when we had only two cars and two scooters to choose from. That was the tragedy both of Indian industry and the Indian consumer.

Then came the opening of India’s economy, and we thought it would only be limited to automobiles, but India slowly saw an uptick in manufacturing. From auto ancillary units, we sprung out into automobile manufacturing. I still remember the time when Ratan Tata launched India’s first indigenous car, the Indica. There has been no looking back since then.

But some of our critical sectors that we pay homage to and that we are proud of have been sectors that have largely been about labour arbitrage, whether it is apparel, jewellery, or for that matter, services. I’ve often asked the question and received no answers as to why India could not create its own Google or Facebook, and why we needed Indian entrepreneurs or Indian minds to go to the US and actually create these fantastic platforms with huge valuation. That has largely to do with three things: we can’t accept failure; we don’t believe in risking capital; and we play safe.

Indian industry has often believed that the size of the Indian market, and you look at it at 1.4 billion people, is large enough for them to serve, and therefore they don’t believe in going abroad. And this is exactly what has happened today. India’s problem is not that its exports will suffer. India’s issue is that it doesn’t have global brands. Even the brands that are owned by Indian companies which are global are brands that were acquired by Indian companies, not Indian brands that went global.

Other than the Taj, which has a sprinkling of hotels, there is no other global Indian brand. I remember the time when Ratan Tata took a call, along with RK Krishna Kumar, and decided that Indian Hotels would open three hotels in North America—one in New York, the other in Boston, and the third in San Francisco. It was a very strategically planned move then.

Today, the Tatas own Air India, which is perhaps the only global brand of Indian origin. And you can see the headway that the brand is making, both in terms of opening new routes and refurbishing and recalibrating their fleet. But then we have remarkable success stories in India. Look at Jio, one of the finest digital platforms that the world can ever imagine.

I was delighted that Mukesh Ambani, on August 29, in his annual general meeting speech, actually talked about taking Jio global. That’s what we need to do. We need our airport operators to own and manage more airports overseas. We need consumer brands to go abroad, rather than just the staples that normally go. We need to create a Campa that will then travel across the world, and so on. That’s what we need to do.

So my belief is that until and unless we create a body of global brands, we will not succeed. And that is the problem.

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