Davos 2023 | Bain & Company sees India as 'bright spot' for investment

Bain & Company on Monday, January 16, said it sees India as a "bright spot" for investment by private companies. In an interview with CNBC-TV18's Managing Editor Shereen Bhan, Manny Maceda, CEO of the company, said, "India is a bright spot for most companies thinking about a place to invest, thinking about the customer base, thinking about a place to invest for supply chain, for manufacturing, for technology."

He said the company is still bullish on India, "In a world where there is clarity on the rivalry of the West versus Russia and developed western economies versus China, India has stayed in a great position. India’s demographics are inherently attractive – it has got a great local market. India is one of the countries in the world that still has reasonable population growth, an emerging middle class."

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China

Maceda said Beijing went down a different path on COVID-19 and there was also a strong decoupling of the world economy because of that, "US companies also sort of pulled back and said we cannot really access Chinese markets the way we used to and then there were a lot of discontinuities in the global supply chain as China was the key part of it."

The CEO said, "So there is a lot of resilience that companies tried to build to deal with the fact that China was sort of doing its own thing for a few years. Now that China is choosing in a very rapid way to re-enter the global economy, an economy of the size of the US is now going to come back into the global stage. So that is making companies think about a lot of their choices on China and it is one of the big topics in 2023 strategy."

Layoffs

Taking about layoffs, he said, "In a world where we all chose to figure out how to work remotely, there is a tech sector boom and every major tech company is now announcing layoffs, but put it in context. Companies like Salesforce doubled in size from 40,000 to 80,000 employees in the last few years and so now they are making a correction. So it is an adjustment to that over-exuberance."

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He said the world needs to have a little more predictability in scenario planning, "We cannot predict the future, but we can scenario plan. So what happens in the next pandemic, what happens in the next war? We do not want to be surprised anymore by the rapid reactions we all made when Russia invaded Ukraine. And then we have to build more agility."