In India, Andhra Pradesh-based firms span irrigation projects, roads, airports and power, having outbid established players and outpaced them in growth. In fact, India's four best airports — Hyderabad, Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi — are all managed by AP entrepreneurs.Learn more: After making it big in India, AP infra entrepreneurs go global
And yet, for all these barriers, new firms are emerging in unexpected places. Vinayak Chatterjee, who graduated from IIMA in 1981, first joined a consumer-goods firm. After deciding against a life-sentence of selling soap, he went on to establish Feedback Infra, an engineering and consulting firm in Delhi that specialises in infrastructure projects. With 1,250-odd staff, half of them engineers, and a list of blue-chip and government clients, it exemplifies the kind of high-end services that India could excel at. Mr Chatterjee reckons his costs are a quarter of rich-world firms’. Big parts of this business are “no different fundamentally from IT outsourcing”, he says. The priority for now, though, is to build scale at home. With about $50m of revenue, growing by about 30% a year, the firm is on its way to that goal. A flotation would be a natural next stage in a few years’ time.Reminds me of the bold statement Steve Jobs once made to former Pepsi exec John Sculley when he tried (and succeeded) to woo Sculley to run Apple: "... prefer to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?" (refer to 1983-1993).
High tariffs can stagnate an otherwise ripe market. There is no better example than the tariff on pistachios in India, which, until this year, carried one of the highest pistachio tariffs in the world at just over 30 percent.What happened?
Ultimately the combination of commercial and governmental advocacy, diplomatic efforts, and an India-focused approach paid off, and nearly two months ago Indian leadership reduced the tariff on pistachios from 30 percent to 10 percent. This news resulted in tremendous excitement ...Read more here.
