Global wealth, Indian business

Comparing India and China's Fortune 500 performance may not be entirely fair, but it offers some thought-provoking facts at a time when India is flaunted as the only decent economic game in town

Media references to Mukesh Ambani or Gautam Adani rarely omit a breathless mention of their wealth. Mr Adani, they remind us, is India’s richest man and the world’s third richest billionaire on the Forbes “Real Time billionaires” list. Mr Ambani is India’s second richest man and the eighth richest on the Forbes list. 
 

To find the richest Chinese businessman on the Forbes list you have to scroll down to number 15 (Zhong Shanshan, who owns a bottled water company listed in Hong Kong). The next stop is Zhang Yiming, at number 24, the 39-year-old former CEO of ByteDance, owner of the Tiktok app, who resigned under pressure from the Chinese government for unspecified reasons and now spends most of his time overseas. Ma Huateng of Tencent weighs in at number 28.
 

The point here is not to analyse who’s richer than whom but to suggest a paradox: That in the global scheme of things the dimensions of Indian businessmen’s personal wealth appear to dwarf the scale of the businesses they run.
 

Of the Big Two Indians at the top end of the rich list only one of them can boast a Global Fortune 500 ranking — Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries — which is based on the hard fact of revenues rather than the ephemerals of market sentiment. Despite a hefty jump of 51 spots, Reliance remains outside the top 100 with a rank of 104 (although it has been in the global rankings for 19 consecutive years to 2022). Among the Indian private sector companies on the Global 500 list are Tata Motors (370th), Tata Steel (435th) and Rajesh Exports (437th). It is possible that the breakneck speed at which the Adani group is expanding in India might land one of its companies on the Fortune rankings one day soon.
 

A comparison with China’s Fortune 500 performance may not be entirely fair, since the presence of Chinese state-owned majors high up on the list is partly on account of Beijing’s energetic attempts from the 1990s to merge corporations to qualify for the rankings. Still, there are some 145 Chinese corporations in the Fortune 500 to India’s nine (four of them in the private sector).
 

Though Chinese businesspeople do not feature as high on the global rich lists as Indians do, more of them run corporations that have a global arc. Consider the examples in technology alone. At number 20 is a certain Hon Hai Precision Industry, better known by its trading name Foxconn, the principal assembler for Apple’s iPhones, iPads and Mac products. At rank 55 is Alibaba, whose promoter Jack Ma had a spectacular fall from grace with the Chinese government. Then there’s Huawei at rank 96 and gaming giant Tencent, investor in such Indian start-ups as Udaan, Swiggy and Ola, at rank 121.
 

To be sure, neither Zhong Shanshan nor Zhang Yiming’s companies figure in the Fortune 500 but the latter can certainly claim global fame with its iconic and wildly popular TikTok short video app.
 

In contrast, few of the Indian biggies on the Fortune 500 list can claim to be genuinely global companies, though they may be globally known names. Reliance Industries, for all the shock, awe and admiration it generates in India, remains a stolidly domestic giant. One significant foray overseas was in shale gas assets, which it exited in 2021.
 

As for the rest, Tata Motors could qualify for the global company label courtesy its acquisition of Jaguar Land Rover in 2008. Tata Steel, on the other hand, is trying to become a domestic giant again after an expensive acquisition of Anglo-Dutch Corus has left it struggling with a lemon in the UK (though the Netherlands plant is a solid performer) and exits from Singapore-based NatSteel. And Rajesh Exports is a gold and diamond jewellery manufacturer that recently announced that it would set up a semiconductor unit in Telangana under the Centre’s incentive scheme.
 

A counter-argument to this modest global presence could be the global reputation of the IT majors or the explosion of Indian Unicorns. But they serve to highlight another irony: Despite India’s reputation as an IT powerhouse, it is the Chinese technology companies that can claim durable global leadership. The four Indian IT majors mostly predate the Chinese tech giants by a decade or more — Infosys in 1981, TCS 1968, Wipro’s IT services division in 1980 and HCL in 1991.  The oldest of the Fortune 500 Chinese tech majors is Hon Hai, started in 1974. But Huawei was founded in 1987, Alibaba in 1999 and Tencent in 1998.    
 

These are thought-provoking facts at a time when India is being flaunted as the only decent economic game in town with the world economy (including China) is said to be tanking.