By Asmita Pant
“I think this is such a great time for India if, if you look outside globally so many forces in the world are creating tailwinds for this country. The world that had been building for a truly global, seamless economy is now de-globalising to some degree,” said Manny Maceda, CEO, Bain & Company, Chair, India Business Leaders Award (IBLA) Jury.
Maceda was speaking at the IBLA Jury meeting alongside other IBLA Jury members such as Standard Chartered Bank’s Zarin Daruwala, Mahindra Group’s Anish Shah, Federal Bank’s Shyam Srinivasan, HUL’s Rohit Jawa, CaratLane’s Mithun Sacheti, Olympic Champion Abhinav Bindra, Meta India’s Sandhya Devanathan and Zerodha’s Nikhil Kamath.
“We have to see from a bit of a wider arc because we look at the per capita consumption across all categories. that we play in a large swath of categories, we are very, very diversified, and we are still, you know, 1/6 of neighbouring countries,” said Hindustan Unilever’s Rohit Jawa.
He added that there are huge amounts of opportunity in growing consumption. “So, I think the many forces such as digitisation, the access to information, the access transportation, drive the consuming class, wanting to upgrade, all of that hunger to have a better quality of life. All of that is in scale in India. It is going to be and is the best consumer story of this decade, and we’ve just started seeing it play out. If you look back five years, the middle class and above has doubled, and we expect that to double again. And that itself, you know, they consume at a much higher factor of consumption one or two times. So, we will see a huge amount of breakthrough and consumption.”
According to Jawa, India cannot focus on a few quarters of inflation, deflation, because that’s really a small sliver in the larger arc of the country’s trajectory. “We are very, very as Hindustan Unilever, very optimistic, we have been here 90 years, and we have seen this our business and our country, go from strength to strength, and I think the best is yet to come.”
“We have to build different kinds of supply chains, we have to think about which countries are allied and that creates opportunities for India,” Maceda said adding that as the world continues to decarbonise, India should try to build a transition towards greener energy that creates opportunities for the country.
On digital transformation, the Bain & Company CEO said that digital transformation around the world is creating opportunities for India.
“The Indian business community, as well as the government, is enabling capture for all of these opportunities to create both opportunities for inside India resurgence, but as well as the helping India play a place in this world that’s much more meaningful than it’s been.”
Maceda pointed out that global risks change how companies make their decisions. Listing down all the unpredictability that happened in the last five years — global pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, tensions in the Middle East — Maceda said that the risks might actually act in favour of the country.
“Many of those might actually play if India handles itself, right, both the government and the businesses to create opportunity. And so it’s weird to say that participating in India more as a global company might actually be a risk management strategy.”