Columbia Business School's South Asia Business Association hosted a panel discussion on India's foreign investment activities. Moderated by Sree Sreenivasan, dean of students and associate professor of professional practice at Columbia University's School of Journalism, the panel consisted of P. R. Chandrasekar, CEO of Wipro for the Americas and Europe; Jack Freker, president and COO of Zenta; C. N. Madhusudan, president of NIIT Ventures; and Euan Rellie, partner and managing director at Business Development Asia, LLC.

"India Unleashed," the dramatic theme of the 2007 India Business Conference, aptly characterizes recent foreign investment by Indian firms. After all, the total value of foreign acquisitions by Indian companies has risen dramatically, from $2 billion in 2004 to $7.2 billion in 2006. In the first quarter of 2007 alone, Indian overseas mergers and acquisitions activity totaled $18 billion. As the Economist recently noted, "For proud Indians, nothing, except perhaps victory for their national cricket team, is as sweet as the sight of Indian companies marauding acquisitively across the globe. And marauding they are."

Several panelists found this recent turn of events remarkable. "Just a few short years ago, I was on panels talking about the infrastructure woes and some of the political challenges of outsourcing to India," said Jack Freker of Zenta, noting that while these concerns largely remain, the focus has shifted dramatically to India's aggressive overseas investment activity. "It's a sea change," he said. "The pace of change is enormous, and it's accelerating."

As but one example, Mr. Freker exclaimed, "Who would have ever thought that [Indian conglomerate] Tata would buy one of the largest steelmakers in the world," referring to the company's purchase earlier this year of the Corus Group, itself the product of a merger between two massive steel concerns, Koninklijke Hoogovens N.V. and British Steel plc, in the late 1990s. Tata is now the fifth-largest steelmaker in the world.

C. N. Madhusudan of NIIT Ventures characterized this change on personal grounds. Some of the companies that he approached as an investor in the past "were wary of me and seemed disinclined to see my company as a serious investor. Today, most companies look at you as a serious investor, and the word India has completely changed in terms of the weight and image that it has."

Mr. Madhusudan attributed part of the current expanding trend of Indian investment overseas to the country's economic turmoil of the 1990s. "The writing was on the wall: export or perish. We decided we needed an overseas presence," he said, noting that 50 percent of his firm's overall business is now generated outside India.

Three years ago, the Indian government facilitated this trend by loosening restrictions on Indian companies investing abroad. While Indian companies were formerly barred from investing more than $100 million in any overseas enterprise, they may now invest an amount up to the net worth of any overseas target acquisition.
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