Kanika Datta: The big business of catch-up

SWOT

Here is a theoretical question: how big an enterprise would you get if India's two largest corporations, Indian Oil and Reliance Industries, were merged? Before you even begin to think of the usual terms like "behemoth" and "giant" consider this.

At $ 37.6 billion, the combined 2003 revenues of this notional conglomerate "" which would include the world's largest greenfield refinery from Reliance "" might be enormous by Indian standards. But by global standards, the corporation would be about middling.

To get a perspective, the revenues of India's two largest corporations taken together would be $10 billion less than the world's largest Asian corporation "" Samsung, the South Korean chaebol.

In terms of the Fortune 500 global rankings of corporations in 2003, which are the latest available, the combined entity would weigh in at number 98, behind, in order of ranking, Samsung (at 59), China National Petroleum (69), Sinopec (70) and Hyundai (94).

Or look at the issue another way. The Asian Top 10 list (excluding Japan) consists of six companies from South Korea, a country with less than 5 per cent India's population but an economy that is roughly the same size (see table). Overall, there are 13 South Korean corporations in the Fortune list to India's one.

Since comparisons with China are inevitable, here's how India's Big Two would stack up. IOC is nearly $20 billion smaller than Sinopec, the second largest Chinese corporation, which is also a government-owned petroleum major.

Reliance Industries (which would have figured in the Fortune 500 rankings only after the Reliance Petroleum merger) is only larger than the tenth largest Chinese corporation, China Construction Bank. China has 11 companies in the Fortune list.

If you were to pit this abstract Indian giant against the US biggies, the differences are even more stark. In fact, at roughly $78 billion, the combined revenues of the 10 largest India corporations trail the world's largest corporation "" Wal-Mart "" by nearly $170 billion. India's 10 largest corporations taken together would weigh in at number 10 on the Fortune 500 listings.

The gap, in fact, appears to have widened. In 2001 the gap between the collective Indian top 10 and the world's largest corporation "" then General Motors "" was $128 billion.

The object of this admittedly simplistic number-crunching exercise "" partly collated from the latest BS 1000 corporations annual study "" is merely to indicate the distance Indian corporations need to travel to establish themselves as unassailable players on the global scene.

It is a point worth remembering as India becomes the flavour of the year among global investors and celebrates booming stock markets and Q3 growth numbers.

It could, of course, be argued that size does not really matter, efficiency does. This is, after all, how resource-starved Japan established itself as a world beater through the seventies and eighties. It is no surprise that there are 88 Japanese companies in the global 500 list.

It is fair to say that in the 13 years since economic reforms began, Indian corporations have established themselves as some of the most competitive producers of a range of goods and services "" from engineering to IT-enabled services.

The point is whether all of this is enough to propel India Inc into the big league over the next decade, since cost and efficiency can hardly be considered high entry barriers to competition.

Much future hope is being placed on outsourcing and IT in particular. But both India's IT giants, Wipro and Infosys Technologies, India's 27th and 30th largest companies in 2003, have revenues of less than $1 billion.

Given the enthusiastic manner in which Indian companies have started acquiring companies abroad, there are certainly encouraging signs that India Inc is finally beginning to think global in a more meaningful way. The question is how rapidly it is able to assimilate the lessons.