Re-Covering Forbes India

Because the founders who stayed the course—they started Infosys in 1981 with a seed capital of Rs 10,000, and built one of the best-known companies—are grooming a crop of young leaders to take over. The global financial crisis of 2008-09 has forced Infosys to re-examine its established business model. Should it stick to its founders, with years of experience and enormous public profiles, or rely on a new breed of little-known 40-year-olds? The transition is risky, especially when Infosys, for the first time in three decades, expects revenues to shrink by 3 to 7 percent this year, rather than grow at 30 percent like two years ago.

Nobody in the world has handled a data management project of this magnitude before: Assign every single one of India’s 1.2 billion citizens a Unique Identity (UID) number. For this, in the first phase the authority will photograph 600 million Indians, scan 1.2 billion irises, collect 6 billion fingerprints and record 600 million addresses. The UID number will allow 80 percent of unbanked Indians to open bank accounts, thus driving financial inclusion. Although brilliant minds from the private sector and the smartest bureaucrats have come together to realise this project, there are initial fears of mistrust and conflict. So far, they seem to have done just fine.

As N Chandrasekaran has become more fit and agile since he took over as CEO, so has TCS. Shaking up the foundations of India’s biggest IT firm in a matter of 18 months, he is making TCS adapt to the new demanding world of IT services. Revenues have increased from $6 billion to $8.2 billion, the market value of the firm has doubled, and in the last one year TCS stock has bettered all its listed peers in India—Infosys, Wipro and HCL. The biggest shift though is in the way the industry, analysts and media now perceive TCS, which was earlier seen as stodgy.

The elephant in the room, so to speak, is Uttar Pradesh, which has enough seats to give the ruling UPA a majority in the Rajya Sabha. A good showing would also have a salutary effect on the credibility of Manmohan Singh’s government, which has been on the brink of being ousted ever since the 2G spectrum scam broke in 2010. Singh’s grip on the economy has weakened and economic variables like inflation, growth and currency are running amok. There are apprehensions about what could happen if Rahul Gandhi becomes more powerful in the party, considering that his stand on critical issues where votes meet reforms is demonstrably left of centre.

Smartphones, as they are now called, are more abundant in India than food. They have permeated our lives in ways we thought unthinkable five years ago. There are devices that can—or will, soon—read a bunch of physical and environmental data to diagnose diseases or prevent emergencies; wearable devices that ‘listen’ to us; even maybe a headset that measures your brainwaves. The innovations have also made us think seriously about the age-old distinction between facts, information, knowledge and wisdom. The coming era of supersmart phones will also make us think seriously about privacy, about work-life balance and about relationships. For answers, we will have to look within.

What’s interesting about Novartis is not just the breakthroughs it is making in discovering new cancer cures, but how it is going about it. The company is innovating even in the way it is pursuing M&As. While the normal route for M&A is to target a company with an interesting product or market position, Novartis is doing “precision M&As”: Buying out specific businesses from rivals so that it can bulk up on strengths in its chosen areas of research and new drug development. Jimenez expects “a new brutal world” for health care companies as countries are forced to double health care spending over the next 10 years.

Entrepreneurs from the South, in sectors as diverse as tractors, media, foods and infrastructure, have made rapid strides and created large enterprises and national brands. Mallika Srinivasan, who helms India’s second largest tractor maker Tractors and Farm Equipment (Tafe), is betting on long-overdue farm mechanisation to aid farmer prosperity and India’s food security. In India, where yields for almost all crops grown are far lower than the global average and where land availability is low, the way forward lies in raising productivity through mechanisation. Srinivasan’s vision is that Tafe’s revenues from farm equipment should equal those of tractors in 10 years.

IFMR Capital is proving to be a crucial link for financial inclusion, with its mission to reach out to Indians who find it difficult to get a housing loan or a business loan because they are not part of the formal system. IFMR has enabled capital of around Rs 30,000 crore for 100-odd originators thus far, by lending directly to them or connecting them to institutional investors. The originators, in turn, provide finance to informal sectors, serving 25 million end borrowers. Under Kshama Fernandes, MD and CEO, the annual volume of financing done by the company has risen to Rs 13,244 crore in 2016 from Rs 975 crore in 2012.

To launch a new publication in the midst of a World War would strike most as folly. But BC Forbes did, and the first issue dated September 15, 1917 carries a strap that reads ‘Devoted to doers and doings’. Having outlived governments and regimes and lasted a hundred years, The Forbes 100th Anniversary special issue, a collector’s delight, brings the very best of Forbes through the years. It also brings together a galaxy of the world’s 100 greatest living business minds: From the legendary Warren Buffett who is seen on the cover holding the very first issue of Forbes magazine to Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Ratan Tata, sharing their experiences, learnings, failures and successes.

Food tech platform Zomato is making an audacious bid to transform itself into a farm-to-fork company with HyperPure, a delivery platform that supplies restaurants with ‘clean’ and ‘fresh’ produce and even eco-friendly packaging. It is indeed a huge opportunity, what with Goldman Sachs projecting that the restaurant dining market will be worth $28 billion by FY25, up from $13 billion currently. Co-founder Deepinder Goyal’s is an exciting gambit, but a risky one, too. After all, sending meals to consumers is one thing, but delivering vegetables, meat and groceries to restaurants quite another. Goyal for his part will be assured that he’s got Ant Financial, which last month pumped $210 million into Zomato, firmly behind him.

If there is a common trait among Ahmedabad’s billionaires, it is their determination to keep a low profile. Were one to bump into any of them at a social gathering or a public place, it would be difficult to identify them as billionaires. As most of them like to put it, their focus is on work and family. Another similarity is their ability to sniff out opportunity, and take risks. Also attribute it to upbringing and value systems that make an Amdavadi businessman always think of scaling up his business globally. Sandeep Engineer, founder of Astral Pipes, finds his place for the first time on the Forbes’s World’s Billionaires List for 2019, among the eight from Gujarat’s industrial capital.

In October 2019, Sridhar Vembu—born to a family of farmers in Thanjavur, he studied and worked in the US—shifted base to Mathalamparai in Tamil Nadu’s Tenkasi district, following a vision: To take Silicon Valley to the village. Vembu was counting on techies leaving cities for smaller towns and villages, and providing relevant tech education to rural youth to make them employable. Vembu’s Zoho Corp provides cloud-based customer relationship management solutions and over 40 apps for online accounting, human resource and inventory management. As India endures a reverse migration of millions, Vembu’s blueprint for a world in which folk get educated in the village and stay back to work there takes on huge meaning.

Former investment banker Falguni Nayar launched beauty and fashion ecommerce platform Nykaa from her father’s office when she was 49. Almost a decade later, after her IPO was oversubscribed nearly 82.5 times, India’s richest self-made woman billionaire says she is only getting started. In the recent past, a clutch of gritty founders, who took the plunge into entrepreneurship—some for the second and third time—in their late 30s and 40s, are finding themselves peaking in their roaring 50s, building entities worth over $1 billion. These are mostly former professionals who, after garnering plenty of know-how and leaning on yesterday’s learnings, have chosen to go it on their own with the backing of technology and capital.

Indians spend an average of 2 hours and 36 minutes a day on social media platforms. Content creators are building on this, making millions of content pieces every day, some of it for brands, in an era of ‘paid partnerships’ and ‘collabs’. The Forbes India-INCA study takes stock of India’s digital stars—a motley and sprightly mix of influencers and digital content creators on social media—who are followed by millions and sought after for brand collaborations. The Rs 900-crore industry is pegged to grow at a CAGR of 25 percent and become a Rs 2,200 crore industry by 2025, as per e4m INCA’s Influencer Marketing Report 2021.

Meet the 30 under 30 Class of 2023. These youthful and enterprising achievers across finance, technology, art, entertainment and sports that make up the list are, like most of the alumni in their day, only getting started! Take the vibrant four on the cover who are prime examples: Raj Shamani, founder, House of X; Ambika Nayak, musician, DJ; Harsh Agarwal, founder and creative director, Harago; and Sakshi Sindwani, fashion content creator. The criterion to pick the class of 30 Under 30 has always been to discover the young before they make it big. The 30 achievers span 21 categories this year, picked by an expert jury for each category.