Posts from — May 2010

Domestic cellular operators bid over $15 billion in a windfall to the Indian goverment’s auction of 3G spectrum. Analysts had only expected about $7 billion but the intense competition among Reliance Telecom, Bharti Airtel, and Aircell caused the license price to go up in a manner reminiscent of the European and American 3G auction in years past.  The two carriers owned by the Indian government Two government-owned carriers, BSNL and MTNL, which launched 3G services last year, are required to  pay the same amount as the highest private bid in the regions where they were awarded licenses.

Big players such as  Alcatel Lucent, Ericsson and Nokia should see “moderate” benefits from the Indian 3G roll out, programmable logic suppliers like Altera and Xilinx should also be positioned well to benefit from incremental regional equipment spending, according to Nishna Biyani, research analyst at Prabhudas Lilladher quoted in the EE Times.

India 3g map by carrier, from telecomtalk.info

The Indian Institutes of Technology or IITs are the leading engineering schools in India and typically accept only 2 percent of all applicants. The government recently created 8 new IITs, mostly in greenfield projects.

450,000 high school grads took the famed Joint Entrance Exam (JEE)  in April, an 18.3 percent increase over the last year. The results were just announced and for the first time final seat selection and counseling  will be guided via an online process. In my day, all students had to travel to the nearest IIT for an in person interview.

The IIT Bombay zone produced maximum number of successful candidates with 3145 students figuring in the merit list followed by IIT Madras (2619), IIT Delhi (2264), IIT Kharagpur (1481), IIT Kanpur (1341), IIT Roorkee (1305) and IIT Guwahati (521).

In years past, many graduates of the IITs have emigrated to the United States. The world’s greenest venture capitalist, Vinod Khosla, the #2 person at Kraft Foods, Sanjay Khosla and the former head of consulting firm McKinsey & Co, Rajat Gupta are all IIT alumni resident in the United States.

It happens all the time to me. American and European companies come to me for help with India and they preface it with something like “Well, we spent the last five (or ten) years figuring out China. Now our investors are hankering for us to expand our role in India. All we need to do is fine tune our strategy and execution a teeny bit for India, can you help with that?”

The premise is faulty, nine times out of ten.  While India and China are both large, growing Asian economies that have liberalized in recent decades and are new to lifetimes of current Western managers, the similarities stop there. The key factors for success in both countries could hardly be more different. The social and physical infrastructure is poles apart.

India is a free speech democracy that is home to a thousand cultures and almost all thrive from Jews to Muslims, to Tibetans.  India’s government has limited authority over its people and (fortunately) over its companies and entrepreneurs.  Indian citizens’  affinity to west is double that of China.

One way to look at the differences between the two countries is to talk to an Indian executive working for an American company in China. My friend Rajesh Dalal of Johnson and Johnson has done just that and here is a link to a recent article that he wrote for Forbes magazine. I think you will find it to be useful.

A couple of years ago, I funded a short movie helmed by noted Hollywood director and my friend, Paul Maslak.  Paul has directed such stars as Kiefer Sutherland and Rebecca deMornay; and he was the ideal choice to demonstrate the verbal and non-verbal challenges for Americans doing business in India.

We have now made the movie available in two segments on YouTube. Make sure you watch both segments in sequence.

Segment 1:

Segment 2:

The Society of Indian Automotive Manufacturers reports a 64% increase in the sales of commercial vehicles for April 2010 compared to April 2009.  49,086 commercial vehicles were sold in India last month.

The passenger vehicles segment in April 2010 grew at 34 percent over same month last year. Indian companies sold  143,976 cars in April, compared with 103,227 units a year ago.  (Breaking down further, passenger cars grew by 39 percent, sports utility vehicles grew by 12 percent and MPV grew by 27 percent in April 2010 over April 2009).

Three wheeler and two wheeler sales were up by 22 percent and 20 percent respectively.

This is yet another indication of how India’s growth continues unabated at a breathtaking pace.