The Underdog Ascends: The Rise of a New Indian Elite
The joining up of India, digitally and physically, has democratized access to economic opportunities. This has helped new groups of people rise in the Indian economy. These newly ascendant people are neither based in India’s megacities, nor did they study in elite universities and nor do they belong to the socially privileged castes. From […]
The Rise of the Woman Voter Has Big Investment Implications
Amongst registered Indian voters, more women today are voting than men. The rise in women’s active participation in politics (despite lower representation in Parliament) is a culmination of greater access to information and to business opportunities and greater availability of free time. All of these have been, in part, facilitated by positive policy changes. […]
The Mega Opportunity in Indian Megacaps
Although India’s 20 most profitable listed companies (the ‘Megacaps’) account for around 50% of the profits generated by the BSE 500 companies, these Megacaps account for just 34% of the BSE500’s market cap (down from 41% a decade ago and 45% nearly two decades ago). Indian retail investors’ fascination with SmallCaps seems to be the […]
The Polarization of Corporate Profits in India is Reducing
In the decade running up to Covid-19, corporate profits were increasingly polarized in India i.e., the top 20 listed companies accounted for an ever-larger share of India Inc’s profit pie. However, since FY21 the picture has changed as smaller companies have begun to grow their profits faster than the top 20 listed companies. This […]
Marcellus’ Portfolio Leads India’s Capex Change
Whilst public sector capex has grown steadily in India between FY19 and FY23 (14% CAGR in nominal terms), the same is NOT true for private sector capex (7% CAGR in nominal terms). In such a scenario, Marcellus’ portfolio companies have grown capex (i.e., net block) significantly faster than the capex growth in the BSE500 […]
The Rapid Rise of Female Entrepreneurs in India
Data from the RBI shows that women in India’s urban areas have more money in their accounts than men. Across all levels of the education system, Indian women are outnumbering and outperforming Indian men. Both during our travels and through our number crunching, we can see that urban women are getting wealthier, thanks to […]
Marcellus Christmas Special: How India Changed Its Master Narrative
‘Master narratives’ are culturally shared stories that guide the thoughts and behaviours of the citizens of a country. After surviving the dark, desperate decades immediately following Independence, India has reinvented its master narrative over the past 20 years. The world-beating performance of the Nifty50 over the last 20 years, the widely hailed Mangalyaan mission that […]
From Konappana Agrahara to Electronic City: A Village as a Microcosm of India
Three decades ago, the fortunes of two tiny villages ~20 kms away from Bengaluru changed for the better. In 1992, Infosys set up its campus in these villages and triggered a transformation in what is now known as Electronic City. This monumental change created winners (the tech companies, their employees, landowners) and losers (landless farmers, […]
How Policymakers Have Driven Economic Change in India
Post-1947, India’s economy has been through four distinct eras. Now, with socialism fading away and with the country increasingly operating as a free market economy, we see five distinct directions in which India’s economy will evolve over the next decade: (1) Profits will polarize in the hands of a few highly efficient companies; (2) Wealth […]
A Century Spent Answering Four Questions
Over the past century, every politician and policymaker who has governed India has wrestled with four critical questions: (a) Can the free market deliver economic development OR does the Government have to do the job? (b) Can India gain from opening itself to the wider world OR will the world act as a ‘drain’ on […]
Outsourcing 2.0: The Global Capability Centre Boom in India
In the early years of the 21st century, India became the IT outsourcing hub for the Western economies. However, over the past decade, as India’s talent pool has widened to sustain multiple functionalities beyond IT services, the West is also outsourcing audit, finance, HR, marketing, analytics, and other functions to India. As the West’s labour shortage […]
Midnight Approaches for India’s Retail Lending Boom
India’s savings rate, on a net basis (i.e., savings less borrowings), has touched a 40-year low, as for the first time ever, Indian households are borrowing more than they are saving through bank deposits. This fall in the net savings rate is a by-product of three structural trends: (a) the youthful demography of the nation; (b) the […]
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