India

“When you're in a really fast growing economy, talent wants to rush towards technology. They want to rush towards finance. So, so there was a bit of a talent gap in the sector and smaller organizations were figuring it out and filling it, but bigger organizatio…”

“They were involved in some public-private partnerships, for example, that were actually losing money for the people that they were trying to support, but they looked really good on paper.”

“Cricket won't cross geographies in Asia because no one really plays cricket in Asia except for India”

“We were actually currently working with a group of Indian analysts where it's an outsource effort where we have very, we give them very specific marching orders.”

“How many million people is Modi going to lift out of poverty? Right? I reckon it might be more than the Chinese have, but just whisper it.”

“What if India today is at the same point of its commodity demand cycle as China was in 2003? Now that could be big, and my suspicion is that that hunch could explain part of why global commodity markets and energy markets remain fairly well supported.”

“India is a very interesting market, but it's also set up in a market structure that is set up to advantage local investors at the expense of the foreign, and so that's very tricky.”

“India has just not done that. It hasn't created the conditions domestically, either through force or through incentives to be an investment-friendly economy. And I think until they do that, I am bearish in India.”

“Four of the largest economies in the world actually don't have defined enterprise software layers. That's China. It's Japan. It is India and the Asian Peninsula. They don't have defined enterprise software. They have some enterprise software companies, or ente…”

“We have an investment in a company there called Gio, which is the largest provider of internet access. It's moved India from one of the most expensive Providers of wireless internet to consumers to the second cheapest in the world.”

“One of the lessons I've learned over the last couple of years, 30 years, is we don't put enough political risk into our Like a 20 in India is not the same thing as a 20 in the United States. There's so many things that can go wrong, and the rule of law is so l…”

“And in the US, probably the building, the land for a building, is going to be 20% of the cost of the building, 25. In India, it's 65, 75. So the land purchases everything.”

“So we have about 40% of our book in India, and it's the fact that ultimately we are looking for great companies that have long runways to really compound capital, and today India is a deeper market. There are more than 3000 listed companies, and so our ability…”

“India will have to rely on manufacturing and services. It will take a long time for, we're seeing their manufacturing capabilities increase, so it'll be a combination, but services will also be a big offering for India. Luckily, Indians speak English. They've …”

“It's firstly not even feasible today, for example, to make a t-shirt in China. The labor costs are just too high, but it is feasible to create a factory for garments or for washing machines in Bangladesh, in India, in Vietnam.”

“We think India will be the new growth country of the world.”

“The emerging market outperformance, the outperformance of Brazil, of Mexico, of India, of Indonesia, of Singapore, et cetera, all that is being hidden by China.”

“If you look at Singapore, if you look at Indonesia, if you look at Brazil, If you look at India, all these markets are actually up for the year. They're up on their equity markets, and they're up on their bond markets, or they're roughly flat, depending on whi…”

“India, you know, oil continues to be the, you know, sort of their Achilles heel as far as their current account, and we're seeing the reserves come out, and it still is a market with a ton of corruption, and so it's from an ease of doing business for foreign m…”

“If you look at India, they're going to have five times as much electricity in 20 50 as they have now.”

“So you take a country like Bangladesh, hundred and seventy million people, eighth largest smartphone user base in the world. As I said, GDP per capita higher than India. You only have two VCs in the whole country.”

“There is basically two countries, Bangladesh and Pakistan. We're combining about four hundred million people. GDP capital actually higher than India. But still, sub-one percent e-commerce penetration, low levels of digital payments, and low levels of BTP softw…”

“On the public market side, there was a lot of ownership of the same things. Not a lot of differentiation in people's portfolios, except on the margins.”

“There's been really good evolution in the type of manager in India, in venture, which looks like the U.S. A lot now in terms of the type of person who finds themselves with a venture fund, and it used to be investment bankers, a transaction experience, and it …”

“Asian Paints, which is a lot like the Sherwin-Williams in decorative paints in India. They have over a 50% market share in a very under-penetrated market.”

“What's been fueling the market is domestic investment, which over that same period is something like fifty-five billion dollars, and there are seventy-five million new mutual fund investors, which even in the Indian context is a big number, and pension exposur…”

“It's among the most fragmented markets in the world in terms of all the different themes and industries that are represented, and it is among the most liquid for an emerging market.”

“There are growth businesses like cement, like power, like real estate, that from a US context, we say, oh, they're pretty mature sectors. In India, they're not mature at all.”

“Private sector debt to GDP in India is like, 53%. I think in China it's a 195%.”

“In reality, 80% of new generating capacity in India is renewable.”

“I think of top Indian schools back then, 90, 95% of people left.”

“Very small companies are actually unusually expensive right now, where there are small cap indexes trading at a three or four or five turn premium to the larger cap index.”

“India's largest bank is smaller than China's 11th largest bank. Its largest six private sector banks put together are one seventh the size of ICBC.”

“And now it's India where there are a million people joining the labor force each month and a million more moving from the hinterlands to the cities.”

“About five percent of the companies are majority government owned. I think in China, it's 30 or 40 or more percent.”

“What had once upon a time been pushing a third of global economic activity after the depredations of conquest and colonialism and a flirtation with socialism was three percent of the global economy.”

“The other is that valuations must be expensive, and because India has had a relatively decent run, that too feels like it should be the case, but when you decompose it, yes, returns have been okay, but because earnings growth has been pretty strong for the lar…”

“There are more than 5000 publicly traded companies. Of which, depending on how you cut it, anywhere from 700 to upwards of 1500 are investable at institutional scale.”

“You'll tend to see historically very fragmented industries in India where there are 300 publicly traded bank and non-bank lenders that are beginning to give way To concentration where the top three or five or six are accounting for an outside share of top line…”

“In the past, one of the hard things about India is you could be absolutely right about the operating performance trajectory, and the transmission to share prices could be incredibly slow.”

“Whereas when I think about my US experience, and it doesn't matter how small the company, how novel the research approach, there are a lot of other people poring over the same idea in The differentiated edge is going to be small and short-lived. In India, some…”

“In the Indian context, that's a curious thing that market performance has been pretty strong, but manager attrition is really high and duration is not so hot.”

“Net flows from foreign allocators are functionally zero to India.”

“Two thirds or three quarters of companies have one or zero sell side analysts covering them.”

“Some of it's in the consumption basket with income per capita now at 2500 dollars. You're going from a place where two-thirds of that was consumed by food and shelter In housing to a place where people really have disposable income. Three hundred million India…”

“So much so that there's a Harvard Business School professor I worked with named Tarun Khanna, who'd done this seminal research where he said, conglomerates are the worst form of business unit and organization and suboptimal everywhere in the world, except Indi…”

“The average Indian back then was earning barely a dollar a day, and even the people who were my colleagues who'd gone to top flight universities were earning maybe a hundred dollars a month.”

“There were times that we had to buy an airplane ticket, one for a custodian, and a second airplane ticket in the seat next to them for a box full of share certificates, so they could be physically delivered to The buyer, so the trade would close smoothly.”

“It's over two and a half decades to hit the level of Peru and Ecuador and Botswana. And that's something a lot of countries have done over the last half century, and I think probably India can do too.”

“Very seldom have these things gone bust, and afterwards people said there's absolutely nothing that would have suggested this. Usually there's something in how they've allocated capital, How they've done business with associated companies, margins they earn th…”

“In many cases, it's not the largest, the highest profile, the indexed constituent Representative of a particular theme that's actually gonna do best from a shareholder or return on equity standpoint, and it's that appetite to roll up our sleeves and try and un…”

“China's GDP growth has been 16 X versus eight X for India, but China's index performance on that 16 X GDP growth has been two and a half X, and India's index performance on that eight X GDP growth has also been eight X.”

“In India where data disclosure is really good, but data aggregation isn't so good, that's allowed us to do some pretty classic filters for earnings, consistency, quality, things of that nature.”

“Just in the time I've been investing, there have been permanent losses of capital in one of the largest banks, in more than one of the leading telecom companies, in the largest brick and mortar retail company, one of the big software companies, and these were …”

“We've had the same country managers in Japan, in China, in India, Korea, and Australia from the very beginning, and we've been there for 20 plus years”

“And I don't think the U S is going to be the dominant market in this decade. At this point, it's probably going to be India.”

“India's exciting theme for us, so we have probably as much unfunded commitment there as we do in China.”

“It's hard to compare India to China for many reasons, but the demographics are far superior. I think 50% of Indians are under 30 years old. I think it's 32% of Chinese.”

“If you're gonna build a reasonably sized portfolio in India, you should have feet on the ground in India. Flying in and out is often not a recipe for success.”

“Now, if you look at equities, the MSCI global, Korea, China, India, Brazil, make up 70 plus percent of that index. So you are actually buying a very concentrated exposure, not a very diversified exposure.”

“So if you say, well, I'm just going to invest in China and India because these are the largest economies, It's a mistake because it's not your job to support large economies. It's your job to make money. Putting that many eggs in so few baskets doesn't make se…”

“Our focus on China and India, it's a big chunk of our 52% that's venture.”

“India will probably follow that path in the next 10 years, and it will be a robust exit market there as well.”

“India right now is going through a very difficult period. It's got a double whammy now of being in the crosshairs of AI because of IT services and the huge part of their economy that that sector represents. It's got the risk that it's facing from the Iran war,…”

“It was shocking to see the evolution of the venture ecosystem there where now many of the funds we visited, 60% of their LPs were domestic.”

“Since 2018, India has been Our largest overseas allocation of any region or country.”