India's firms build global empires

Once sheltered from overseas competition, Indian companies are now building empires - ramping up exports, making acquisitions in the U.S. and Europe, and attracting billions in foreign capital.

Tulsi Tanti made his fortune building windmills, not tilting at them. But executives at French nuclear energy giant Areva might be forgiven for conjuring images of Don Quixote when the 49-year-old Indian entrepreneur squared off against them this year for control of Germany's leading wind-turbine manufacturer.

Areva - controlled by the French government and boasting annual revenue of $13.7 billion - is one of the world's most powerful power companies. Tanti's Suzlon Energy is a family-owned venture, barely a decade old.

Tulsi Tanti, Suzlon Energy: Bought 86% of German wind-turbine manufacture RE power earlier this year, making his company the fifth-largest supplier of wind power in the world.

Ratan Tata, Tata Group: purchased Britain's Tetley Tea for $430 million in 2000, followed by Daewoo's truck operations, the Ri tz-Carlton in Boston, and this year Corus steel for $13 billion.

But Tanti's bid for Hamburg-based REpower was anything but quixotic. Back home in India, Tanti had reinvented the model for selling wind power, forsaking the fragmentation typical of the global industry for an end-to-end approach consolidating the entire process - surveying and purchasing sites for wind farms, building and maintaining turbines, and even distributing the power - under a single corporate roof. Suzlon's sales were soaring, its stock hitting record highs on India's stock exchange, and foreign bankers were tripping over one another to lend Tanti money.

When Areva, which already owned 30% of REpower, offered $148 a share for the remaining stake, Tanti outbid the French Goliath, then outmaneuvered it at every turn. By May, Areva conceded defeat, clearing the way for Tanti to lock up 86% of REpower in a deal valued at $1.7 billion. To hear Tanti tell it, the contest's outcome was never in doubt.

"I can take a company with a 4% margin and turn it into a company with a 20% margin. They can't," he says with a shrug, sipping a glass of watermelon juice between meetings in Mumbai. "So I knew from the beginning: Whatever they offered, I could pay much more."

These days Tanti isn't the only Indian executive who feels the wind at his back. Buoyed by a robust economy, a booming stock market, and the sharp appreciation of the rupee, India's flagship firms are pushing beyond their home market into the wider world.

Once sheltered from overseas competition by a government fearful of foreign domination, Indian companies now are building global empires with impressive speed, ramping up exports, striking cross-border corporate alliances, snapping up firms in the U.S., Europe, and emerging markets, and attracting billions in foreign portfolio capital to India.

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But Indian manufacturers are going global too. Consider Bharat Forge in Pune: After six foreign acquisitions in three years, Bharat has emerged as the world's second-largest manufacturer of axle beams, crankshafts, and other forged auto components. CEO Baba Kalyani says he's ready to spend another $250 million on foreign acquisitions and expects to overtake Germany's ThyssenKrupp as industry leader by the end of next year.

Ranbaxy Laboratories, India's largest pharmaceutical company, manufactures generic drugs in 11 countries, distributes and markets them directly in 49, and counts on foreign markets for 80% of its revenue. CEO Malvinder Singh touts Ranbaxy as India's first true multinational. "Our headquarters may be in India," he says, "but we have learned to operate locally and in a very decentralized manner."

India Inc. still wrestles with the old demons: bad roads, an inadequate education system, shortsighted politicians. In the most basic categories of development, India's economy lags behind China's. Morgan Stanley estimates that China outspends India on infrastructure by a ratio of seven to one. The result: India's manufacturers pay twice as much for electric power as do their Chinese counterparts and three times as much for railway transport.

It's estimated that 40% of India's perishable goods rot before reaching market. India's vaunted technology institutes graduate hundreds of thousands of engineers each year, but their skills are uneven, and India's broader educational institutions have neglected the rest of the nation, leaving 30% of the population unable to read and write.

India's dysfunctional political system - riven by caste, religion, party, and faction - bears much of the blame for these failures. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and members of his economic team win high marks for policymaking savvy. But they answer to a fractious political coalition whose leaders seem indifferent to the realities of the global economy. Little wonder that while China attracted $70 billion last year in foreign investment, India took in less than $10 billion.

And yet, for all those handicaps, India is barreling forward. Indeed, for the past two years its economy has managed growth rates of 9%, only a percentage point or two shy of China's. In many ways Asia's two emerging giants have embraced development models that are polar opposites. China's strengths may be India's weaknesses - but the reverse is also true. Says CLSA equities strategist Christopher Wood: "China's economy grows because of its government, while India's economy grows in spite of it."

China's broad highways and bustling factories are the product of an authoritarian regime that puts a premium on control. Growth is stoked by government spending and exports, and the economy is dominated by state-owned companies. India's more chaotic business landscape is dominated by family-owned conglomerates, many founded generations ago during India's years as a British colony.

Lightly regulated sectors like software programming, telecommunications, and pharmaceuticals spawned new players such as Narayana Murthy, who launched Infosys (Charts) from his Pune apartment, and Sunil Mittal, who parlayed a bicycle-parts company in Ludhiana into Bharti Airtel, India's leading mobile-phone company.

The success of Indian ventures, whether old or new, owes much to the quality of their domestic capital markets. Deng Xiaoping launched mainland China's exchanges in the early 1990s as an experiment. More than a decade later they remain badly regulated, wildly speculative, and mostly off-limits to both foreign investors and private Chinese firms.

The Bombay Stock Exchange, by contrast, has been around twice as long as India has been independent. It is one piece of infrastructure India's regulators have gotten right: encouraging new ventures, punishing poor management, and accelerating growth of established players. India, CLSA's Wood argues, "has by far the best growth story of any of the emerging economies."

In April, Hindalco Industries, part of India's Aditya Birla group, paid $3.6 billion for Canadian aluminum company Novelis. In May, as Suzlon closed its deal on REpower, Vijay Mallya's United Breweries snapped up Whyte & McKay, the world's fourth-largest distiller of Scotch whisky. In August, Wipro (Charts) pocketed New Jersey software house Infocrossing for $600 million. In the first three quarters of this year, Indian companies announced 150 foreign acquisitions with a total value of $18.1 billion, according to Dealogic - a fourfold increase over all of 2005.

But none can match Tata Group for ambition. In April, Tata Steel paid $13 billion for Corus, an Anglo-Dutch steel company, securing mills in Ohio and Pennsylvania and quintupling its steelmaking capacity. That remains India's biggest foreign purchase to date. But between Tetley and Corus, Tata scooped up a slew of other overseas assets: an undersea-cable business, the truck-manufacturing operations of South Korea's Daewoo group, a stake in one of Indonesia's largest coal mines, and a raft of foreign hotels, including the Ritz-Carlton in Boston.

This year, for the first time, the group will take in more revenue overseas than it does at home. Tata is well on its way to becoming India's first truly global brand. And chairman Ratan Tata, who wouldn't talk to Fortune for this story, is still shopping. In August he declared his interest in buying Jaguar and Rover, now owned by Ford Motor.

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Source - Fortune