The global economy needs a new powerhouse. India is stepping up
Global manufacturers are looking beyond China, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi stepping up to seize the moment. The government is spending nearly 20% of its budget this fiscal year on capital investments, the most in at least a decade.
Modi is closer than any predecessor to being able to claim that the nation — which may have just passed China as the world’s most populous — is finally meeting its economic potential. To ge ..
India is on the cusp of huge change,” said Nandan Nilekani, a founder of Infosys Ltd., one of the nation’s largest technology services companies. India has quickly created capacity to support tens of thousands of startups, a few billion smartphones and data rates that rank among the lowest in the world, he said.
US-China rivalry is providing a tailwind. India and Vietnam will be the big beneficiaries as companies move toward a “China-plus-one” strategy, supply-chain analysts say. Apple Inc.’s three key Taiwanese suppliers have won incentives from Modi’s government to boost smartphone production and exports. Shipments more than doubled to top $2.5 billion of iPhones from April through December.
As powerhouses from China to Germany contend with slowing growth, the stakes are rising to find another nation equipped to propel the global economy. Morgan Stanley predicts that India will drive a fifth of world expansion this decade, positioning the nation as one of only three that can generate more than $400 billion in annual output growth.
The thesis is reflected in global equity markets, with India’s Sensex index trading last quarter at the highest in a decade versus the S ..
When Modi rose to power in 2014, campaigning on “minimum government, maximum governance,” voters saw an opportunity to build on liberalization, hoping for “Ronald Reagan on a white horse,” as a prominent economist put it.
India’s new prime minister, the son of a tea seller, promised to clear the remaining cobwebs from the License Raj, including a culture of paying bribes for access to public services. Modi styled himself as a political outsider with managerial panache, poised to apply his ..
Nowhere else is the super wealthy growing faster than in India, drawing comparisons to the heady times of America’s Gilded Age. Since 1995, the wealth gap between the top 1% and bottom 50% has soared about three times more than the equivalent metric for the US.
A new class of entrepreneurs is creating more unicorns — unlisted companies worth at least $1 billion — than any other nation apart from the US and China. Their growing success is propelling property prices in Mumbai and Bangalore ..
Shiv Bhargava, the founder of Viraj Exports, a mid-sized garment exporter, said building scale in India can be difficult. At his factory in the industrial city of Noida, Bhargava weaved between sewing stations where workers stitched clothing bound for Zara. He has about 1,000 staff in the country, but says he’d have more if it weren’t for relatively restrictive labor laws. Modi has sought to streamline the rules, sparking fierce opposition from some state governments.
