Just read a great interview by Ravi Venkatesan ( Ex-Chairman of Microsoft India). I would say this was a very well articulated interview by him which explains why companies need to invest in India. Below is an excerpt from the interview which I loved reading it.
If you stick with India, there are four important things you can learn:I am waiting for his book to be published later this year - Conquering the Chaos: Win in India, Win Everywhere. I hope it would be as interesting as his interview was.
A lean cost structure: I.B.M. has more employees in India than anywhere else. Honeywell has 20,000 people here. John Deere a third of its engineers in Pune. That’s adding several hundred basis points to the bottom line for them.
Second, Indian products are good for other markets: While I was with Cummins, we made a small generator here for India. Now I can go to Home Depot and buy their generator set, made in Pune. As southern Europe gets poorer, consumer products tailored for India are selling there – smaller size sachets of shampoo, for example. The Spanish and Greeks can no longer afford to buy what they could buy before.
Number three, you’ll find excellent talent: a lot of Unilever or Procter & Gamble’s African business executives are from India, for example.
And fourth: Having operations in India will fundamentally change most overseas companies. For instance, in 1996, I came here to a troubled joint venture that Cummins had with the Tatas. Instead, we turned it around and now, Cummins has 55 joint ventures worldwide, and almost all of them are making money. In many ways, Cummins learned how to manage difficult joint ventures in India.