Mumbai street scene from Silicon Dragon ventures
The only other tech market in Asia that is halfway as exciting as China is
India. It has the promise to close the gap with China but is no match yet.
India’s mobile market is large, venture spending is vibrant, and high-profile
IPOs such as
MakeMyTrip are happening, with more
on the way soon from up such swift up and comers as mobile ad service inMobi and
PC help center iYogi.
Plus, India has proven it is rich in R&D and a lot more than outsourcing.
Even so, red tape and poor infrastructure hold back the entrepreneurial spirit
here. Investors Bill Draper, Lip-Bu Tan, and Sumir Chadha did the trailblazing
in India. Today India’s venture leaders such as Ashish Gupta and Sudhir Sethi
are looking for the next, new thing in mesmerizing India – the world’s
second-fastest-growing economy and Asia’s third-largest economy.
At IDG Ventures in Bangalore, I met with Sethi, who is chairman and managing
director and runs the tech media company’s $150 million India fund. It’s one of
five funds in the IDG Ventures network established by Pat McGovern, the
visionary founder and chairman of
International Data Group in
Boston. If a strategy works
in one locale, then IDG works to bring the formula to startups in other
places. China has proven to be a gold mine for IDG, where it’s made
multimillion-dollar returns from early investments and successful IPOs of
instant-messaging service Tencent and search engine
Baidu. India could be
next.
During a trip to India, I met founders of startups with advances for
everything from detecting lung cancer at an earlier stage to recycling
electronic waste in a cost-effective way, to bringing solar power to villagers,
to offering superfast mobile searches, to three-dimensional online games, to
robotic-powered vacuum cleaners. India’s also become a mecca for low-cost and
sometimes jerry-rigged inventions—in Hindi,
jugaad.
Tata Motors’ tiny Nano
car at an itty-bitty price tag of $2,500 and the Indian government-backed tablet
computer selling for $35 are some examples. So is my favorite find: a
Nokia cell phone with a
built-in flashlight. India may not have a Google, Apple, Baidu, or Tencent yet,
but it is moving into more technical work than writing software and answering
phones.
Yet India’s entrepreneurial journey is at least five years behind China’s
path. There’s no Jack Ma or Robin Li in sight or a big-time IPO like
Youku. India
lacks the entrepreneurial buzz and fast pace of China tech clusters. Indian
entrepreneurship has been led by grassroots efforts, and the government hasn’t
always been venture friendly.
If India is ever to break through, it needs to ditch an image as just for
outsourcing or low-cost engineering and business services—a major challenge for
the world leader of the booming $500 billion global outsourcing market.
But India could eventually become a tech minipower and grab some of the
limelight from China. Contemporary corporate centers such as Whitefield on the
outskirts of Bangalore and the Gurgaon satellite city in Delhi showcase that
India is rising.
See Forbes post, Nov. 27, 2011:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccafannin/2011/11/27/tech-gets-exciting-in-india-5-years-behind-china/
