In
our last post on India, we told you of Finance Minister Palaniappam Chidambaram's budget, which led to a
drop in ADRs, American Depository Receipts, of Indian companies, and about a meeting held in New York discussing said budget last week. That same week, the U.S.-India Business Council, or
USIBC, launched an executive mission to India to participate in the sixth U.S.-India High Technology Cooperation Group, or HTCG, held in New Delhi Feb. 28 and 29. It's nice to see some ties are forging ahead amidst the
nuclear controversy.
USIBC, together with its partners in India -- the Confederation of Indian Industry, or CII, and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, or FICCI -- convened business-to-business deliberations covering all aspects of high technology trade and
investment in the fields of life sciences, defense trade and information technology. Their
government Web site is worth a look. The U.S. Department of State should be
updating theirs soon, too. USIBC has a number of
goals for 2008, including
raising FDI caps and ramping up U.S. investment in manufacturing, among other things. IT should be a focal point for Indian dealmakers as well; venture capitalists have been pouring money into the sector. They invested about $928 million in 80 deals for entrepreneurial companies there during 2007,
according to the Quarterly India Venture Capital Report from Dow Jones VentureSource. Look for companies such as AT&T Inc. to capitalize on this trend. Wednesday morning from New Delhi, AT&T announced it would
commit $1 billion worldwide this year to expand network services. On joint ventures, Hindustan Times reports that Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp. gained access to a largely untapped European IT market on Wednesday in a strategic partnership with T-Systems, Deutsche Telekom's IT outsourcing services division.
WiMax is another technology that we'll see sweeping across India. This week, as part of their plan to one-up rivals Bharti Airtel and Reliance Communications Ltd.,
Tata Communications said it wants to spread the wireless broadband service throughout India by 2009, with plans to inject $500 million to $600 million into the project by 2010. On a separate interesting note from Bloomberg.com, their cousin, Tata Motors Ltd., plans to
borrow $3 billion from nine banks to finance the purchase of Ford Motor Co.'s Jaguar and Land Rover luxury-car brands.
Since we're keeping you informed about important meetings: Cleantech Group LLC
will host its first annual Cleantech Forum India in October. Keep an eye out for
more interesting get-togethers from the USIBC, too.
As
China struggles with inflation, India is still looking fairly strong. Come back for more about India and other emerging markets on Corporate Dealmaker. Our magazine publishes on March 24. -
Baz Hiralal
Juergen Lasowski
And the winners are...
