Audi 2007 Annual Report Download - page 18

expensive luxury brands are making a beeline for India. Earli-
er this year, I asked Yves Carcelle, the head of Louis Vuitton,
why his company was so bullish in India. Carcelle was un-
equivocal. “India is the luxury destination of the 21st century.”
Another example: 20 years ago, there was just one state-
owned airline. Now we have a dozen private carriers, but the
super rich would rather buy their own planes, and at least
300 private jets have been ordered.
How have things changed so much? I asked Mukesh Am-
bani, head of the giant Indian conglomerate Reliance. He is
convinced that India’s greatest resource is its people. “Give
the Indian people the freedom and the space to excel and they
will do so,” he explains. “This can be India’s century if
enough of us reach for the stars.” He gives the example of the
agricultural sector (where Reliance has made huge invest-
ments recently) as the great underutilized resources of the
Indian economy. Apply modern technology and logistics and,
Ambani believes, India will move even faster ahead. After all,
India is the world’s second-largest food producer after China,
although at 1.5 percent, its share of world trade is compara-
tively low.
Even Arun Sarin, despite being born and educated in In-
dia, said in New York that he was struck by the high caliber of
Indian managers. He has spent much of his working life
abroad, but when Vodafone acquired Hutch Essar in India a
year or so ago, he returned to the country of his birth. “The
managers of the company we had acquired were truly the
equal of the best in the world,” he remembers.
Who are these people? And why has it taken until now for
them to come to prominence? Some of it has to do with demo-
graphics. India may be an old civilization, but it is an astonish-
ingly young country. Around 60 percent of the population is
under 30, and one-third are under 15. And the generation that
led India to its height of glory was born at the end of the 1950s
and 1960s.
Nandan Nilekani, Co-Chairman of software company Infosys,
is one such example. When I first met him in 1980, he was a
brilliant young computer engineer, who had benefited from
going to one of the state-run Indian Institutes of Technology
(IIT) – the best 3,500 are selected each year, from up to
“This can be India’s century if
enough of us reach for the stars.”
Mukesh Ambani, head of Reliance
Engine for growth: The free-spending middle class numbers almost 200 million people. India is the luxury market of tomorrow.
Each year, there are hundreds of thousands more cars on the roads.
16 MARKETS & MOVERS