Following on from last year’s “Doing Business in China”, our January event on “Doing Business In India” was equally well attended and successful. CETC Committee Member, John Batten, arranged 3 speakers for what was an extremely topical event, given that it was held on ‘India Republic Day’.  Among other special items for the day was a special FT supplement (see www.ft.com/indiaglobal2006 ), which highlighted one of the local companies present at the CETC event – Oxygen Healthcare, whose CEO, Prashant Shah, joined our speakers’ panel.

The first speaker was Sam Tully (son of Sir Mark Tully, the former BBC Correspondent India). Sam is a Director of Insinger de Beaufort, responsible for building the company’s India business. From an amusing start with the 3 C’s – Culture, Curry and Cricket - Sam gave us some examples of the language barriers e.g. ‘Tailoring for Ladies and Giants’ and ‘Front door broken – please enter from the backside’. He then moved on to the more serious business issues. The legal systems are similar but things can take ages. There are political risks in doing business there and it must be remembered that the infrastructure is generally very poor. There are 1.1 billion people, 28 states and 22 languages, but for business English is used (but not always well understood, as per the earlier examples). There is still a good economic growth rate - 7% appears sustainable. Sam then discussed the various models for getting involved in India - corporate investment, corporate partnerships and private investing. It is not possible to buy shares directly but there are good funds available. In conclusion, it was evident that a wealth of experience is available to guide anyone wanting to do business in India and that such experience should be drawn upon.

Our second speaker was Vivin Acharya from Catalyst IT Partners. His family moved to the UK from Mumbai in the early 1950’s and Vivin was born and bred in Northampton. He now assists companies in setting up call centres and customer service organisations in India. Access to skilled English-speaking workers is good and ongoing cost savings can be significant in facilities, salaries and telecom costs. Vivin went through the factors involved in making the decision to go offshore and then the various ownership models – Own, Joint Venture, Outsource, BOT (Build-Operate-Transfer) and their pros and cons. He then discussed some of the realities such as unmet expectations (on both sides), highly skilled graduates doing boring jobs leading to a high ‘churn’ and large salary inflation on job changing. Outsourced cold calling is particularly viewed as a dirty job. Setting up in India requires a cadre of expats for the initial period and it is strongly advisable to get advice on choosing an outsourcer.

The final speaker was Dr Shai Vyarkarnam the Director of the Centre for Entrepreneurial Leadership at the Judge Management School. Shai was born in New Zealand to an Indian diplomatic family; talk about India and where it is going has always been part of his life. He is now involved in Trade Missions to India and has met the President, the Prime Minister and many senior politicians. The President, Dr Kalam, used to head up the Indian Space Research Organisation and the PM is an Economics PhD from Oxford who once described the UK as a ‘small fishing island off the coast of Europe’ in a letter to Tony Blair! It is Shai’s view that the pace of development between the UK and India will depend on the way that the UK tackles its position in the EU. India is keener to work with the UK than the US, as it is concerned about the US double-deficit and regulatory issues such as Sarbanes-Oxley. India is a democracy and the only country in the World to have a 100% electronic voting system. It is the fastest growing country east of the UK; it has 21 companies on the London Stock Exchange’s FTSE market and increasing numbers on the AIM market. In summary, Shai considered that the real message, especially for Cambridge, was that the way forward is co-development and partnerships.

Prior to the seminar, the CETC held its Annual General Meeting, at which Tim Eyre, of British Telecom, was elected a Committee Member.

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