There's no stopping the Indian juggernaut

It is astonishing, and entirely unpredicted, that India's outbound investment should begin to rival inbound FDI. The numbers quoted in a full-page report by the Financial Times earlier this week say that outbound investments from India in nine months this calendar year total $7.2 billion, up from $4.5 billion in all of last year, which was treble the amount in the year before.

If the Tata acquisition of Corus happens, we may see the total exceed $10 billion this year - which would give competition to inbound FDI, estimated at $12 billion in 2006! Dealogic has counted 112 foreign acquisitions this year - which makes it about three deals every week. Are our companies on steroids?

If you want to understand how outward-looking Indian companies have become, one other figure helps tell the story: the total capital expenditure by 1,425 Indian companies in the last financial year was about $24 billion, while $10 billion is now being invested overseas this calendar year.

So companies are going global with a vengeance, and this highlights how dramatically the Indian environment (remember Fera?) and business mindsets (and competence levels) have changed in the last 15 years. Whether it is Videocon or Suzlon, Tata Tea or Bharat Forge, companies are talking of becoming one of the world's big two or three in their business, if not No. 1.

Sometimes, the acquisitions look like minnows swallowing whales. Tata Tea, for instance, had sales of barely $300 million, but has been forking out $1.4 billion for its three or four major acquisitions in packaged tea, coffee and flavoured water.

Dr Reddy's, similarly, had sales of $400 million when it bought Betapharm for over $550 million. How are they doing it?

By taking on a pile of debt: Tata Tea's debt-equity ratio is 2.5:1, which most people would consider high. Loans have to be serviced, and will eat into profits. A deal that goes wrong could prove costly - and everyone knows that the failure rate after a company is acquired is not zero.

As a measure of safety, the Reserve Bank has put a cap on how much Indian companies can invest abroad, in relation to their net worth, but total overseas investments so far are about $20 billion, and that leaves a lot of head room for more acquisitions (the net worth of the 1,000 largest companies is about $165 billion).

The way corporate strategies have evolved is also interesting. The oil companies are clearly after energy reserves, from Russia's Sakhalin to Brazil, and from Sudan to perhaps Kazakhstan.

Some early acquisitions by companies like Bharat Forge were meant to pick up troubled firms that had a marketing presence in rich markets, and who would be fed with products produced in low-cost India.

Some buys (especially by software giants like Wipro) were intended to acquire technology and domain knowledge; others were to dig into the Chinese production system.

Now the game seems to have got bigger. Videocon, for instance, is intent on leapfrogging from $1 billion to $10 billion in size, and is buying into brands that have a presence in rich countries, while locating production in low-cost centres. With one deal in the bag and another about to be netted, the company may already be nearing the $6 billion mark.

Suzlon, the world's No. 5 in wind energy, is also using acquisitions to gain size.

Sometimes, there is opportunistic buying at bargain-basement rates: VSNL's acquisition of troubled Tyco, and Videocon's swallowing up of Thomson in Europe.

But what Indian companies have not managed to do so far is to promote their own brands (other than exceptions like Oberoi). The Prime Minister reportedly told a businessman recently that he would like to see one or two Indian brands acquire global stature, before too long.

But Videocon is buying established brands like Daewoo rather than pushing its own, and Taj Hotels is not putting its brand on the premium hotels it has been busy buying in New York and Boston. Perhaps India itself as a brand is just coming into its own, and it will be a while before Indian corporate brands can do the same.