At the end of the last decade, Tarun Das, Confederation of Indian Industry's director-general at that time, castigated the "Cowboy approach" of multinational companies, which were walking out of their joint ventures in India at an alarming rate.
There was much heartburn at the way the MNCs were treating their Indian partners, which had ostensibly outlived their utility of wading through the maze of regulation and providing local expertise.
Even as joint ventures continue to fall apart, the chagrin appears to have been replaced by a sense of inevitability. The current thinking is that mostly those joint ventures will continue which are necessitated by the government's norms, such as in the areas of insurance, retail and telecommunications.
"There are two groups with ambitions. There will be a situation in which the ambitions of the partners would prove to be too large to be accommodated in one company," says Jayesh Desai, national director for transaction advisory services with Ernst & Young.
After nearly a year of murmurs that JM Financial and Morgan Stanley would go separate ways, they have, joined the swelling ranks of joint ventures that have fallen apart.
With this, each of the ventures that dominated investment banking space till December 2005 -- the other two being DSP Merrill Lynch and Kotak Mahindra-Goldman Sachs -- have come apart.
The break-ups have come to be seen as the continuation of a trend that started at the turn of the century, as multinationals became acclimatised to India and the foreigners became familiar with the regulatory framework and the local conditions.
A study by McKinsey, the consultancy, says that 22 of the 25 major joint ventures forged between 1993 and 2003 have failed.
Since then, 50 more are estimated to have fallen apart including Ford-Kotak Primus, Concor-IDF, L&T-Netra, Modi Xerox, RPG Dairyfarm, Tata Honeywell, HCL-Perot, Mahindra-Ford, Benetton DCM, Allied Domeck-Clan Morgan, Daikin Shriram, Apollo-Michelin
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