Tracking the India Inc story, beyond domestic markets

From the days of limited ambition, Indian businesses and companies increasingly look towards foreign markets for growth and opportunity. How will India’s growth story unfold in the coming years? Which are the sectors in which it will be able to take on and overtake global peers? Mint takes a long view.

World’s Pharmacy

Over the last two decades, the Indian pharma industry has grown leaps and bounds driven by its strength in the global generics space to the extent of being conferred the stature of becoming the pharmacy of the world. It ranks third worldwide for production by volume and caters to 20% of the global demand in the generic market in terms of volume. With a strong network of 3,000 drug companies and approximately 10,500 manufacturing units spread across the length and breadth of the country, India offers a unique competitive advantage in the global pharmaceutical industry. The mergers and acquisitions (M&A) value in the pharma and healthcare sector touched a record $4.32 billion in January-June period this year, showing the big ticket investments from private equity (PE) players in the sector. Big PE deals of over $200 million took place in the active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and medical devices segments.

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Nerves of steel

Steel production has expanded rapidly in recent decades, making India currently the world’s fourth-largest producer of crude steel from the 10th largest in 1995. As the economy develops further, steel consumption is likely to increase manifold. India has one of the largest reserves of iron ore for high-end steel, and Indian steelmakers like Tata Steel and JSW have plans to expand capacity substantially in order to meet the anticipated increase in demand not just domestically but also in the international market.

Space age

With the government encouraging private investments in space research, the sector is fully open for Indian companies to start building solutions across domains in the space sector. The Indian satellite industry is now only 2% of the $360-billion global market, but can gain a lot in a couple of years. A newly created Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Centre (IN-SPACe) aims to work towards attracting private operators, while the incumbent ISRO is set to be restructured, with its commercial activities hived-off into a government-owned NewSpace India Ltd, leaving the organization to focus on research and development, scientific missions and exploration.

Reliance Jio Infocomm (Jio), Bharti Airtel, Elon Musk-led Starlink have all shown interest in the battle for satellites in the Indian space. Letting private firms operate space missions has worked in favour of the US. Once private investments come into Indian space, companies can work on building cheaper launch vehicles and new designs for various space projects.

The technology push

While the success story of India’s IT and software services companies have been told and retold many times, a new breed of list nimble-footed technology companies are changing the narrative through disruptive offerings driven by artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud and are pioneering some of the most advanced tools and applications, starting from online retailing, cloud computing to e-commerce. The advent of these new technologies will speed up the migration into cloud platforms and will also allow enterprises to address the climate crisis by making businesses more sustainable. Companies like Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Roblox Corporation to Indian firms like Tech Mahindra, Infosys are betting on the metaverse, which has opened new frontiers for businesses.

Health and wealth

India has the potential to become a global leader in healthcare delivery, a $7.4 trillion industry. Thanks to its large pool of trained doctors and support staff, India can emerge as the healthcare provider for the world offering the highest quality of care at an affordable price. There has been considerable investment in new-age hospital chains with PE investments topping the list. The healthcare sector is the new front for India’s top conglomerates to battle. The Adani Group’s flagship entity Adani Enterprises has set up a subsidiary called Adani Health Ventures which will pit the group against Reliance Industries and Tata Group, who are keen for a larger pie in the diagnostic, patient-centric solutions.