India remains a mystery to international investors. Positively, it is a potentially enormous market—it recently surpassed China as the most populous country in the world. India’s economy is expected to develop at the quickest rate among the 20 largest in the world this year, according to the IMF. Its GDP is predicted to pass Germany and Japan to become the third largest by 2028. Heady growth is priced in by the stock market. Indian stocks have outperformed stocks worldwide, including those in the United States, throughout the last five years.
The drawbacks can appear just as severe. In India, only 8% of homes have a car. There were just 35 million individual investors in Indian public markets last year.
India’s IT scene reflects the conflict between the promises of the future and the realities of the present. Over the last ten years, investors have flooded emerging Internet companies with capital thanks to delirious estimates of hundreds of millions of customers’ spending. Consultant Bain reports that the overall yearly venture capital funding jumped from $3 billion to $38.5 billion between 2013 and 2021. The easy money is starting to run out now. Startups were given $25.7 billion in 2022. Their share of this year’s first half was a pitiful $5.5 billion.
A number of India’s most luminous tech stars have plummeted to Earth. In less than a year, the ed-tech darling Byju’s valuation fell from $22 billion to $5.1 billion. Online hotel aggregator Oyo has postponed going public, despite investors cutting the company’s valuation in half, to $2.7 billion. According to an online website called Moneycontrol, almost 30,000 jobs have been lost by Indian entrepreneurs since 2022.
The capital-efficient technology dromedaries of India are equally merciless. Investor funds have not been raised by Zerodha or Zoho. Info Edge raised a tiny amount of outside funding prior to coming public in 2006, having been self-funded for the previous five years. Info Edge founder Sanjeev Bikhchandani counsels companies to approach each investment round “as if it is your last.
Reducing expenses is one technique to prolong the runway, as venture capitalists refer to the period of time before a company need new funding. Consider employee pay. Wealthy startups sling cash at highly skilled developers from prestigious colleges. Zoho hires recent graduates from obscure universities and puts them through a rigorous training program before accepting them into the group. According to the corporation, this method produces more devoted workers and a larger pool of talent.
