A big moment for as it joins that $100-billion market capitalisation club!
Absolutely. This is part of the India story. As India has grown over the years, we have seen these numbers getting bigger and bigger. Today there are four companies in that club but I am reasonably sure that sooner there will be ten companies. This is a part of the usual India growth and compounding story and the IT sector will be in one of the best phases over the next three-four years. I see no reason why these companies cannot become even bigger.
We can say that is a consumer-facing technology name and then there are TCS, Infosys. Do you think technology is the space that continues to make India proud worldwide and is that the reason for this sort of achievement in the market?
Absolutely. IT has always been one of the core strengths of India and this is one sector which has consistently earned India not only a good name but also forex, based on which we have been surviving for so long. This only gets better. Otherwise, if it was not for IT exports, India would have struggled to make so much imports. IT, at a country level, is one of India’s strongest pillars and when IT sector does well (this is more IT services) and with the new crop coming in, we are evolving into new kind of technology platforms, including consumer tech and edtech. We will see many more of them coming over the next five to ten years. So this is a very natural stage.
During the industrial revolution, a large part of wealth was created over a hundred years from the industrial side across the globe. We are now in a tech revolution. We will see a lot of value across the globe getting created as a part of technology. India is very strong in IT services and also there is a strong consumer market. Technology plays a very important role and I would not be surprised if we have a similar kind of trend getting repeated like what happened in the US,
Also we should not undermine even a lot of banking platforms or companies like Bajaj Finance. They are in some sense also benefiting a lot from technology use. So it does not necessarily have to be a tech company but anything which is tech driven and can create a lot of value through efficiency and growth will be part of it. I remain quite optimistic on that theme.
When we talk about the $100-billion dollar mark, do you think that more such companies will hit that mark as soon as the market cap to GDP increases?
Absolutely. A couple of years ago, I used to say that by 2025, we will have 10, $100-billion market cap companies and 100, $10-billion market cap companies. I think it will probably happen earlier. So it is part of a natural cycle of a growth market and there is no doubt India is a very solid growth market, one of the best markets across the globe.
If we continue our journey in the same way of 7-8% growth, we will definitely see a very good market cap creation and larger and larger companies will get created. A couple of years ago, one could not have thought of a trillion dollar plus company in the US market, but we do have a couple of them now. It is part of that journey. These milestones will only get better and better.
