Inaugurating day 2 of the TiE Global Summit, prominent entrepreneur and billionaire business magnate Gautam Adani of the Adani Group, congratulated the stakeholders while outlining the three major driving forces that will take India to the top of the global economic pyramid in the next three decades.
The second day of the TiE Global Summit 2020 was flagged off with a keynote address by India’s notable billionaire industrialist and business magnate Gautam Adani, Founder, and Chairman of Adani Group. Introduced by Mr. Mahavir Sharma, Chai, TiE Global, Mr. Adani is the poster boy of the Indian entrepreneurial ecosystem, having witnessed the business ecosystem of India surpass episodes of economic transitions.
“Scale for Mr. Adani means a totally different thing that what it means for most of us,” recognizing Adani’s unparalleled credentials as a business leader and first-generation entrepreneur, Mr. Sharma said, “In these episodes of transition, Mr. Adani has emerged as a victorious businessman running a successful conglomerate constituting 6 publicly listed entities with an overall market capitalisation of $40 billion.”
The port baron of India, Gautam Adani started with the Mudra Port in his home state Gujrat and currently, Adani Group of Industries owns 10 ports across the country. The Indian Industrialist was quick to realize the benefits of economic reforms in 1991 and leveraged privatization, liberalization and globalization to the best of his company’s benefit.
Here are the key takeaways from Gautam Adani’s inauguration talk at TiE Global Summit 2020-
Incredible India: Inflection Point and Major Defining Forces
Beginning his keynote by congratulating TiE Global, Chapters and Members for putting on a spectacular show, Mr. Adani sought to share his thoughts with the entreprenerus, thought leaders and executives present at the TiE Global Summit. The topic of Mr. Adani’s talk was “Incredible India.”
Highlighting the progress that the country has made in the last decade, the business magnate remarked, “India is at a dramatic inflection point and in the next few decades, we will have a firm position as the greatest economy in centuries despite challenges and slowdown. In the coming years, India will find it positioned with the greatest opportunity and much more by 2050,” reflecting on the part that India’s democratic values will play in its future, he continued, “There should be debates like every democracy, slowdown, challenges to overcome. But there is no denying the scale of the opportunity for India.”
Defining 3 major areas that will drive growth for India in the next 3 decades as a) Macroeconomic factors that favor India, b) Intersection of Digitization and Sustainable Energy, and c) Opportunities for India in a post-Covid world, Mr. Adani went on to explain his optimism in detail.
Macroeconomic Factors that favor India
Applauding the plethora of reforms undertaken by the government towards the cause of economic growth, Mr. Adani highlighted the macroeconomic factors that favor India, where the country’s GDP currently amounts to $2.8 trillion of the global GDP of $85 billion, it is forecasted to contribute 15 percent share of the expected Global GDP of $160-180 trillion by 2050, at an estimated $28 trillion.
He next emphasized the advantage that comes with India’s population demographic, where India is expected to be at 1.6 billion by 2050 with 1 in every 3 consumers will be Indian in the world. Mr. Adani emphasized the advantage of a thriving middle class in India. He opined, “India will form the largest middle-class population of the world, which will increase India’s rate of consumption. The retail sector alone will worth $10 trillion by 2050 in India, India will be the target market for investment for every global competitor. The stock market will also increase by a factor of 13 times placing Sensex in the range of 600,000. By 2050, India would have created several of its own trillion-dollar companies which define opportunities.”
Intersection of Digitization and Sustainable Energy
Mr. Adani highlighted that excellent research studies have shown the correlation between energy economics and the growth of a nation, reminding the audience that the energy sector has formed the lifeline of the country ever since India’s first industrial revolution in the 1960s. He said, “Energy and digitization are rapidly intersecting. This intersection is the single most defining factor to improve India’s life, pull them out of poverty, put them in the middle-class category, and generate new business models. The marginal cost of electricity will drop sharply due to renewable energy as the sun and wind will always be free. Digitization will enable the cost of storage, processing, and networking to follow a steep decline curve for several decades.”
He went on to underscore the recent progress by stating how India is the cheapest broadband service provider and cheapest mobile devices in the world today where data prices dropped by 95 percent in 5 years and consumption increased 56 times. Acknowledging the role of technology, he stated that sensor, the Internet of Things, AI, Machine learning, Cloud Infrastructure, and other digital technologies will give the economy an impetus while micro sizing several processes and converting every process into service, giving examples of micro-farming, micro-housing, micro-banking, micro-agriculture, etc.
Opportunities for India in the Post-Covid World
Mr. Adani stressed the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of acceleration that has been enabled in two areas. He said, “If India plays its cards right, we are strongly positioned to take a lead in global structural changes that are bound to happen. Pandemic has driven home the fact that hyper-efficient chains are also hyper-fragile. Until now, the primary focus of supply chains was cost. Flexibility will now be equally important,” he continued, “There will be encouraged multisource and localization to support the local market, Acceleration in digital technology will enable us to manage operations remotely, accompanied by a structural shift in the global location where people don’t need to be at places where operations are executed.”
In his closing remark at the TiE Global Summit 2020, Mr. Adani highlighted the factors that are at the core of making India a global behemoth and center stage of global economic investment, “Speaking about different market forces, one must keep in mind the soft power of a nation in getting other nations to want the outcomes that India desires. This depends on historical attractiveness of political values, culture alignment, and foreign policies.”
