Money to be made

The lecture for today was delivered by DR. H Gayathri, “Growth and Business Opportunities” I enjoyed this lecture for two reasons. First, at some point my employer will have a business presence in India and second there were many ties in his lecture that you could make to the book the World is Flat. The fact that India’s exports are expected to triple by 2010, shows that the country will be a player in the world market, health care is already outsourcing some of its non-traditional, non-strategic functions, transcriptions and CAT scan readings.
Growth in the IT and communications industries will also be enormous. The IT expansion and growth is evident with the amount of money that Intel, Microsoft and the like are spending. Per Dr. G, there are 125,000 cell towers today and the need will be 350,000 by 2010. With the JV’s between the phone providers like Nokia and Sony Erickson and air time providers like Vodaphone or Airtel, and cell minutes at a penny, I can see the how the needs will have to be met.

For our site visit, we went to Larsen and Toubro, a 30 bil market cap company with sales of about 7 billion and is India’s largest engineering and Construction Company. I was particulary interested in the visit as L & T is currently one of our vendors that we outsource engineering and IT work to. The facility we went to was their EMSYS division. They manufacture gas meters, hospital equipment and make or convert games to work on cell phone platforms. How cool. Our host was the GP Nagaraj who ran that division.

Their attention to details and our needs was unbelievable. It started with lunch where they had the best food that we had had to date, and for those who wanted western food, they brought in Pizza Hut pizza. They continued this treatment the rest of the afternoon. We had their top officials with us the whole day while we were on the tour, answering questions and giving us insight to the company and at the end of the visit, we were all given a parting gift.

L & T covers outsourcing, offshoring, insourcing and supply chaining in their business model and has made a lot of money in the process. I almost forgot to mention, the company was started by two Danish men, that’s globalization.


After the L & T visit, Karl, Harvey and I went to Bangalore to meet Sonny Tara, my GM for Dinner. Sonny was traveling with our director of IT Gary Burgess. It is funny that 5 people from the USA meet at a hotel in India, eat Thai food, drink wine from Chile and smoke cigars from Cuba, that is a global event. The event was worth the 5 hours that it took us to get there and back.