Philippa Kaur

IN THE HEYDAY of Vietnam’s communist economy, comrades could expect their health care, education, housing and entertainment to be provided by the government. In the freeish-market Vietnam of today, those necessities are still purveyed by one dominant entity, albeit a capitalist one. Vingroup, the country’s biggest conglomerate, and its two listed subsidiaries, Vinhomes (a property developer) and Vincom Retail (which offers other real-estate services), jointly make up 28% of free-float shares in Vietnam’s stockmarket index (see chart). Their revenues are equivalent to nearly 2% of Vietnamese GDP.Having made Vingroup into a dominant force at home, its founder and chairman, Pham Nhat Vuong, now wants to turn it into a household name abroad. In December the group announced plans to list VinFast, its electric-car division, in America this year, to open showrooms across the West, and to sell 42,000 electric vehicles (EVs) globally in 2022, up from a previous goal of 15,000. On March 29th, in the most audacious move yet, VinFast said it would invest $2bn in its first foreign factory, to be built in North Carolina with capacity to make 150,000 EVs a year.That is quite a ride for a firm that began life in 1993 making instant noodles in Ukraine, where Mr Vuong found himself after studying geological engineering in the Soviet Union. He subsequently expanded operations to his home country and in 2010 sold the Ukrainian business to Nestlé, a Swiss food giant, for a reported $150m. The Vietnamese arm became Vingroup. It has been accruing business lines ever since, turning Mr Vuong, who retains a majority stake in the parent company, into Vietnam’s richest man.Between 2011 and 2021 Vingroup’s revenues exploded nearly 50-fold, to more than $5bn. Gross operating profit has ballooned ten-fold in the past decade, to around $800m. Vingroup’s share price is also 50 times what it was at its initial public offering in 2007. It spun off Vincom Retail in 2017 and Vinhomes a year later, retaining majority stakes in both. These lucrative property businesses generate most of the parent company’s profits.Now Vingroup wants more to come from techier sectors, says Le Thi Thu Thuy, Mr Vuong’s deputy at Vingroup and CEO of VinFast. In particular, the company is eyeing EVs. To that end, the group is rejigging its industrial divisions. Last year it wound down VinSmart, an unlisted subsidiary that had grabbed just over 10% of the domestic smartphone market with its own models, and launched two new EV-focused high-tech ventures: Vin ES, a battery-making subsidiary, and Vin AI, a machine-learning arm which is led by a former researcher at DeepMind, Google’s artificial-intelligence unit, and whose task is to develop self-driving technology. As part of the electric shift VinFast will also stop making petrol-driven vehicles by the end of this year.The plan is to conquer the global EV market with snazzy new models—and a crafty new business model. VinFast will sell cars while leasing their batteries, which account for a large chunk of an EV’s cost. That lowers the sticker price, as well as alleviating concerns about long-term decline in range as batteries degrade (the company will replace those which no longer recharge adequately). VinFast’s $41,000 VF8 is one of the cheapest electric SUVs around, even after you factor in the $100 or so monthly battery payments.Vietnam’s president, Nguyen Xuan Phuc, whom Mr Vuong took for a spin in a VF8 at VinFast’s factory in Haiphong earlier this year, certainly looked impressed. Afterwards Mr Phuc reiterated just how Vingroup’s business objectives dovetail with the government’s economic goals. These include the creation of large, internationally competitive conglomerates in the mould of South Korean chaebol such as Samsung. No Vietnamese company fits the bill better than Vingroup.Ambition does not, though, guarantee success. Vingroup’s industrial businesses, of which carmaking is by far the biggest, recorded a net loss of about $1bn last year. Chris Robinson of Lux Research, an analysis firm, is sceptical about VinFast’s ability to compete with established carmakers like Volkswagen, which is ploughing billions into affordable EVs, or Tesla, the industry superstar. He reckons VinFast will struggle to win a big market share outside South-East Asia. Wall Street’s enthusiasm for upstart EV firms has chilled of late in America, which could dash VinFast’s hopes for a blockbuster New York listing. The world’s motorists and investors may prove harder to impress than Mr Phuc. ■For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter.This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Born to Vin” More

JEFFREY SONNENFELD is having what he calls a Marshall McLuhan moment—“15 minutes of prominence soon to subside back into obscurity”. That is because, not long after Vladimir Putin sent his troops into Ukraine on February 24th, the 68-year-old professor at the Yale School of Management drew up a list of firms withdrawing from Russia, helping catalyse a stampede out of the country—470 businesses have closed or cut back operations. His campaign has generated positive media reviews. It has also put him under siege from public-relations types trying to ensure that the companies they represent do not fall into his “hall of shame”.The “Ukraine morality test”, as the New York Times called it, has dramatically raised the profile of a man already dubbed the “CEO whisperer”. Don’t believe it when he talks about returning to obscurity, though. He sees the withdrawal from Russia not just as a virtuous expression of repugnance against Mr Putin’s murderous regime. It is also a nail in the coffin of globalisation. It would be no surprise if he leads a CEO crusade against that next.Mr Sonnenfeld is no stranger to the limelight. Indeed, he has become the high priest of a belief system in Western business which he started promoting almost 45 years ago, and which has at last come into fashion. He calls it business ethics. Its critics deride it as “woke” (“as if there is something wrong with the past participle of awakening,” he harrumphs). There is nothing too woke about why Western firms are pulling out of Russia. Some might call it high-minded but in most cases it is inherently pragmatic. It pleases customers and staff who are outraged by the war, and because Russia is a tiny part of most firms’ global revenues, it is immaterial from an investor point of view.It is a slippery slope, though. Less than a year ago Mr Sonnenfeld was helping whip up scores of CEOs in America in a lather about changes to voting legislation in Georgia and other states. He has celebrated protests by business leaders over gun safety, immigration, climate change and transgender rights. He says that after the corporate pullout from Russia, his most recent powwow with chief executives revealed a sharp increase in their concerns about global supply chains, and a consensus about the need for more self-reliance. In other words, free trade may be next in line on the woke agenda. Amid applause for companies’ quick response to Russian aggression, this ethical mission creep is a worry. Where do bosses draw the line as arbiters of rights and wrongs?In an interview with your columnist, Mr Sonnenfeld elaborates on why he believes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will mark a shift in support for globalisation. As he tells it, the era after the fall of the Berlin Wall engendered a “naive belief” that Western-style capitalism and products like McDonald’s hamburgers would usher in global harmony. Russia’s aggression has buried that notion, he reckons. Asked whether the CEOs he talks to want to change a system that has brought their firms profit, as well as helping lift parts of the world out of poverty, he says they do not want the pendulum to swing back completely to isolationism. But he discerns “diminished enthusiasm for limitless free trade”.He is not alone in thinking that the war will tilt business opinion against globalisation. In his annual letter to shareholders, Larry Fink, boss of BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, said on March 24th that he expected it to prompt companies to re-evaluate their supply chains, probably leading them to bring more of their operations closer to home, even if that means higher costs and margin pressures. Such sentiments gained ground amid the Sino-American trade war during Donald Trump’s presidency, then again amid high labour costs and logistical bottlenecks of the covid-19 pandemic. For the time being, statistics that bear out large-scale reshoring are hard to find. But some anecdotal evidence of it is popping up.That may reflect nothing more than business pragmatism in action. More and better automation helps offset the higher wages in developed countries while reducing transport costs. As countries divide themselves into opposing camps, with China and Russia on one side and America and Europe on the other, their governments may encourage firms to invest domestically in vital technologies such as semiconductors to bolster security of supply. If domestic demand for firms’ goods is increasing, or being subsidised, it makes sense for them to meet it. Moreover, pressure by investors to put more focus on environmental, social and governance concerns may spur Western companies to think twice about having extended supply chains in hard-to-monitor places.Autocrats in the C-suiteBut when businesses wrap themselves in the flag, rather than standing up for pragmatism (and profits), things become more complicated. As bosses are no doubt aware, when pulling out of Russia, they are leaving the field open to local competitors with no qualms about supporting Mr Putin’s regime. They are abandoning Russian employees who may oppose their government. And their crowd-pleasing stance in Russia may help distract attention from other harmful externalities they are responsible for, such as the carbon footprints of their businesses. As with all ideological positions, there is a kaleidoscope of ways of looking at them.Then there is democracy itself. Mr Sonnenfeld argues that companies are a rare force pressing for social and political change in Western society today. He sees the corporate campaign against Mr Putin’s regime in the same light as divestment from South Africa in the 1980s, which he argues helped bring about the end of apartheid. By being good citizens, firms are upholding and enforcing democratic values. Yet the idea of an unrepresentative coterie of unelected executives making moral choices on behalf of customers and employees could undermine faith in democracy, not shore it up. In a world at risk from autocracies like Russia, that would be a crushing own goal. ■Read more from Schumpeter, our columnist on global business:Why Saudi Aramco could be eclipsed by its Qatari nemesis (Mar 26th)Has Silicon Valley lost its monopoly over global tech? (Mar 19th)It’s not easy being an oligarch (Mar 12th)For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter.This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “War and wokery” More

MANAGEMENT ENTAILS some unpleasant conversations, none worse than telling employees that they have lost their jobs. There is nothing enjoyable about giving people this kind of news. But it can be done well or it can be done badly—or it can be done in the style of Peter Hebblethwaite.Mr Hebblethwaite is the chief executive of P&O Ferries, a ferry operator that carries passengers and freight between Britain and continental Europe. On March 17th the company told almost 800 of its workers on a video call that they were being replaced with immediate effect by cheaper foreign contractors. Security guards were on hand to escort the dismissed workers from the ships.On March 24th Mr Hebblethwaite was hauled in front of a committee of British MPs to explain himself. “Are you in this mess because you don’t know what you’re doing, or are you just a shameless criminal?” was the first question. And that was before he made them really angry. He admitted he had not seen a safety-risk assessment into the implications of replacing the original crews with agency workers (two of the affected vessels have subsequently been held in port because of safety concerns). He openly acknowledged that the firm had broken the law by not consulting on the dismissals with trade unions, but that he would make the same decision again because the unions would never have agreed to the plans.If you want to know what slack-jawed astonishment looks like, watch someone telling legislators that the law is not worth following. But what if you take Mr Hebblethwaite at his word—that the business was unsustainable and that the firm faced a choice between cutting some jobs immediately and losing them all? This is a kind of managerial “trolleyology”, the name given to a set of moral thought experiments involving a runaway railway carriage that is careering towards a group of people. In these experiments participants are asked whether they would intervene and sacrifice someone else in order to save the lives of others. Dismissing workers in order to save more jobs is the workplace version of this problem.The Hebblethwaite approach to managerial trolleyology is a simple matter of accounting: saving 3,000 jobs is worth the loss of 800 workers. That meant moving fast, and not bothering with niceties like following the law or affording people due process or dignity.But the point of trolleyology is that the brute logic of numbers often conflicts with moral intuitions. Ethical considerations can involve nuances of behaviour, not just outcomes. For example, people are much more willing to switch train tracks so the runaway carriage collides with someone else than they are to push someone off a bridge into the path of the train in order to slow it down.In managerial trolleyology, too, behaviour matters—even to staunch utilitarians. It makes a difference how people are treated when they lose their jobs, and not just to those who are out of work. Callousness affects the morale of those who are left behind: recent research suggests that a toxic corporate culture is more likely to lead to employee attrition than any other factor. How firms handle redundancies also sends signals to prospective employees, customers and investors. Airbnb chose to publish the memo that Brian Chesky, its boss, sent to employees in May 2020, in which he used a blend of compassion and commercial logic to explain his decision to cut 25% of the workforce.Displays of humanity can be good for the share price. A new study, from academics at the University of Zurich, the London School of Economics and Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, looks at how chief executives responded to the outbreak of covid-19 in early 2020. The authors review transcripts of investor calls in which bosses discussed the pandemic, and find that whereas virtually all of them referred to its economic impact, only about half of them mentioned the human costs. The share prices of firms run by the more compassionate-sounding bigwigs outperformed the others in the early stages of the crisis and well beyond.Every situation is different. The P&O debacle reflects specific aspects of maritime employment law, for example. But if you want a steer on how to handle mass redundancies, Mr Hebblethwaite does not provide it. Managers routinely have to make tough decisions about letting workers go. Whether to show some common decency in the process is not one of the harder ones.Read more from Bartleby, our columnist on management and work:What an honest leaving-do speech would sound like (Mar 26th)Why loafing can be work (Mar 19th)The return of the crowded office (Mar 12th)For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter.This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Managerial trolleyology” More

TWO DECADES ago India’s information-technology (IT) firms were the stars of the rising country’s corporate firmament. The industry’s three giants, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys and Wipro, became household names at home and familiar to chief executives of big businesses abroad, who had outsourced their companies’ countermeasures against the feared “millennium bug”, expected to wreak havoc on computers as the date changed from 1999 to 2000, to Indian software engineers. By the mid-2000s the Indian IT trio’s revenues were growing by around 40% a year, as Western CEOs realised that Indian programmers could do as good a job as domestic ones or better, at a fraction of the price. Then, following the global financial crisis of 2007-09, revenue growth slowed to single digits. For years afterwards the stars seemed to be losing some of their shine.Now they are back in the ascendant. Having declined as a share of GDP between 2017 and 2019, exports of Indian software services ticked up again as the world’s companies turned to them for help amid the disruption to operations and IT systems wrought by the pandemic. In the last financial year they reached an all-time high of $150bn, or 5.6% of Indian GDP (see chart 1). NASSCOM, a trade body, expects the industry’s overall revenues to grow from $227bn last year to $350bn by 2026.In the 12 months to March sales at TCS, Infosys and Wipro are once again forecast to grow by double digits (see chart 2)—this time from a much higher base than 20 years ago. All told, they could rake in nearly $60bn next year, up from just over $40bn in 2019 (see chart 3). In the past two years they have added an astonishing 200,000 or so people to their combined workforce, which now numbers nearly 1.1m. Add the Indian businesses of big Western IT-services firms such Cognizant (which is based in New Jersey but India-focused), IBM and Capgemini, as well as smaller Indian rivals and around 1,600 “captives”, as in-house Indian operations of foreign firms are known, and the headcount rises to 5m.More important, both revenues and ranks of Indian IT look poised to keep growing briskly. Lalit Ahuja, who runs a firm that helps to set up captives, says a new one opens every other week. TCS, the industry’s brightest star, reckons that its sales will rise from nearly $30bn today to $50bn before 2030. It is eyeing 1m employees. Infosys and Wipro have comparable ambitions. And investors are buying it. The market value of the big three has doubled to $330bn since covid-19 first emerged. With the addition Cognizant and Tech Mahindra, another Indian firm, the figure is around $400bn (see chart 4). This represents a huge bet on the future of white-collar jobs.Three global forces lie behind Indian IT’s sparkling outlook. All manner of businesses are digitising ever more of their operations. They are moving more activities to the computing cloud. And work is becoming more remote. India’s low-cost, competent coders can help with all three.Start with digitisation. The pandemic has turbocharged efforts by companies of all stripes to make their businesses more agile, efficient and clever. Retailers have introduced kerbside pickup. Clinics have launched digital doctor’s appointments. Schools have run online classes. Factories have been kitted out with sensors to allow remote monitoring in the absence of workers, locked down at home. Data from covid-19 vaccine trials have needed analysing. All these innovations required sophisticated software. A lot if it has been developed in India since early 2020. And there is more to come. Among Infosys’s many projects are several connected to electric cars (for example software for the vehicles themselves and for petrol stations to offer charging). It is helping a Western retailer expand into health care and financial services.The corporate great migration to the cloud offers further opportunities. According to Anuj Kadyan of McKinsey, a consultancy, big ones include supervising the migration itself for clients, ensuring that the new cloud operations are cyber-secure and adding advanced cloud-based data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) on top. Earlier this year JPMorgan Chase, an American bank, announced it would add 6,000 people to its substantial Indian business to work on the cloud, cyber-security and AI. IBM has opened a cyber-security centre in India to cater to its Asian clients.Combined, digitisation and the cloud make it possible for companies to untether from their physical headquarters not just peripheral functions but parts of their ever more digital core business. Many have done just that during the pandemic, thanks to remote work. This opens up the third opportunity for India’s IT consultants. They could assume some of the core corporate roles from white-collar workers in the rich world. Wages for new hires in India can be as little as $5,000 annually, less than a tenth of the going rate in rich countries. Even with associated cost, Indian projects cost at least 20% less than the same endeavours in the West, estimates Peter Bendor-Samuel, boss of the Everest Group, a management consultancy.A ballooning Indian “talent cloud”, as TCS calls it, is the biggest opportunity of all. It is also the most uncertain. For one thing, some Western companies are having second thoughts about hybrid work (which requires at least partial presence in the office), let alone the fully remote sort. Indian wages are also beginning to rise. India’s IT giants and captives are competing for the best and brightest among themselves, as well as with a vibrant startup scene. McKinsey estimates that compensation costs have risen by 20-30% over the past year. Company executives say it is not uncommon for employees to ask for their wages to be doubled. Attrition at the big firms has spiked.As the nature of outsourced work changes, the Indian advantage may erode further. It is easier for clients to outsource standardised assignments on the periphery of corporate functions to faraway India. It is harder to do so for high-value projects at the heart of their business, which require constant communication, continuity and confidentiality. For these reasons, proximity matters. At the very least, it means being in the same time zone as your client. Infosys and TCS now operate in more than 40 countries. Infosys now has more than 30 outposts across America and is building a new $245m campus in Indianapolis. Mr Kumar’s own job has relocated from Bengaluru to New York. Infosys plans to add 10,000 American workers in the next few years, bringing the total to 35,000. “We needed capacity closer to the customers,” explains Ravi Kumar, who oversees Infosys’s global services business.Still, India accounts for the bulk of its IT firms’ workforce. Although the companies are cagey about where their employees are based, securities filings by Infosys and Cognizant show that, give or take, three-quarters of staff are based in India. If India’s entire IT industry grew at the same rate as TCS, more or less doubling its workforce this decade, that could mean nearly 5m new Indian white-collar jobs—and potentially 5m fewer in the West.This points to a final hurdle. Amid supply-chain disruptions from the pandemic, now compounded by Russia’s war in Ukraine, and a geostrategic contest with China, Western politicians are in a protectionist mood. Few would relish millions of well-paid positions moving to India on their watch. Critical visas that once allowed the Indian firms to send star employees aboard to work directly with clients have already grown harder to come by, forcing these positions to be filled locally. Although data can in theory be stored and analysed anywhere, governments are increasingly keen to limit cross-border information flows, often invoking national security. By building a few more campuses in Western countries India’s IT titans may alleviate some of those concerns. They are unlikely to make them disappear. For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter. More

“SNATCH GROCERIES first, then get a covid test” has quickly become an anthem for the lockdown that started suddenly in Shanghai in the early hours of March 28th. Local hip-hop artists CATI2, P.J. and Keyso describe scenes of panic buying—qiang cai, or snatching groceries—and the threat of being locked out of one’s home amid a frenzied bid to control an outbreak of covid-19 in China’s main business and finance hub. One lyric hints that residents can grow vegetables in the small patches of land outside their apartments or scavenge for edible plants.The song has attracted hundreds of thousands of views online in less than a day, bringing some cheer to an otherwise grim situation. China is currently facing its worst outbreak since the pandemic started in the city of Wuhan in 2020. Thousands of new cases of the highly transmissible Omicron variant are now being discovered each day. The large cities of Shenzhen and Shenyang, as well as the entire province of Jilin, have been locked down in recent weeks.On March 28th it was Shanghai’s turn. The two-phase lockdown of the city, whose 26m inhabitants have been mostly spared harsh containment efforts over the past two years, was announced only hours before it began at 5am that morning. The local government had gone to great lengths to avoid shutting down the metropolis, especially its wealthy central districts. Now that these are under quarantine, it will find it difficult to present an image of business as usual—chiefly because business is anything but.The lockdown’s first phase covers areas east of Huangpu river, home to the main financial centre (and the city’s iconic skyline). Many white-collar workers have packed up toiletry bags and moved into their offices until April 1st, when the lockdown is supposed to be lifted in the east and imposed instead in western neighbourhoods. In order to keep the stock exchange running, employees are said to be sleeping on the floor of the bourse. Countless companies listed in Shanghai have put out statements in recent days to notify investors that they are shutting down their factories in the region and, in some cases, elsewhere in the country. Tesla is suspending production at its electric-car factory in the city, according to Reuters.The pain will be felt abroad, too, just as it was amid the lockdowns in Shenzhen, another city deeply entangled in global supply chains. Although seaborne traffic can be diverted from Shanghai to other ports, such as Ningbo around 100km to the south, the cross-border flow of people is being disrupted. International flights have been rerouted to airports in other cities. Shanghai’s tourism businesses are bracing for a year that will be even worse than 2020.The situation will further dent business sentiment already knocked by smaller-scale rolling lockdowns, laments a foreign fund manager, who has been stuck home for weeks. China’s purchasing managers’ index for emerging industries, such as green technology and biotech, recorded a sharp drop in March, compared with February. It was the worst reading since the index was launched in 2014.Regardless of its precise economic cost, which will only become apparent with time, the Shanghai lockdown is the biggest test yet of China’s draconian “zero-covid” approach to snuffing out the virus. Admittedly, Chinese authorities have shown an ability to learn and adapt to the virus. Shanghainese officials are borrowing from their counterparts in Shenzhen and experimenting with “production bubbles”, which involve busing workers to and from factories in a covid-controlled manner. Some big companies, including Foxconn, a giant contract manufacturer that assembles iPhones for Apple, have pulled this off. If such ruses work, China may be able to cling to its zero-covid approach for longer. If they fail—as they well might given Omicron’s extraordinary transmissibility—the authorities will come under growing pressure to relent. For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter. More

THE MARKET for packaged foods is a competitive one, where price rises by one firm risk pushing shoppers into the arms of rivals. Companies in the industry deal with soaring costs by hedging against spikes in commodity markets using forward contracts, reformulating products so they contain less of the pricier foodstuffs or, failing that, surreptitiously making packages a bit smaller while keeping the ticket price the same.Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

THE MARKET for packaged foods is a competitive one, where price rises by one firm risk pushing shoppers into the arms of rivals. Companies in the industry deal with soaring costs by hedging against spikes in commodity markets using forward contracts, reformulating products so they contain less of the pricier foodstuffs or, failing that, surreptitiously making packages a bit smaller while keeping the ticket price the same.Amid pandemic-related supply-chain bottlenecks, labour shortages and crop failures, food firms have repeatedly done all that. Even so, they have had to raise prices, often less judiciously than is ideal (see previous article). The invasion of Ukraine, known as Europe’s breadbasket thanks to its rich soil, by Russia, the world’s top exporter of wheat, is forcing their hand once again. Together the two countries account for 29% of international wheat sales and nearly 80% of sales of sunflower oil. Disruptions to those critical supplies are pushing up food companies’ costs just as energy costs are also sky-high as a result of the war.It will be harder for European food companies to pass price rises to consumers than for American firms. Supermarkets in Europe are more concentrated than in America, and drive a harder bargain with suppliers. Walmart, America’s biggest, controls 17% of the domestic market. Its British and German opposite numbers, Tesco and Edeka, respectively, have nearly 30% of theirs. Moreover, cost-conscious Europeans shop more at discounters such as Aldi or Lidl. They are also less fussy than Americans about branded products and buy more of the retailers’ own labels.On March 23rd General Mills, the American maker of Cheerios and Wheaties, among other sugary fare, reported healthy margins and quarterly sales that were higher than in the same period in 2019, before the pandemic (though flat compared with last year). The firm insisted that demand for packaged food should remain strong all year as many people continue to work from home at least some of the time. Robust appetite for its products will, the firm says, allow it to raise prices to offset the rising costs of commodities.That may be optimistic. Shoppers’ patience with inflation is wearing thin on both sides of the Atlantic. Investors expect margins to narrow. The share prices of big American, European and Chinese food firms alike took a knock after Russian tanks rolled onto Ukrainian fields on February 24th (see chart). ■For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter.This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Food fight” More

SPEAK TO THE bankers and industrialists at the top of India’s economic pyramid and you hear a common refrain. All Indians, they contend, are at heart socialists—themselves included. The popularity of the Indian version of “Shark Tank”, a TV celebration of capitalism (similar to “Dragons’ Den” in Britain) in which ordinary people seek funding for their business ideas from a gaggle of successful entrepreneurs, suggests that this conventional view may be out of date. The show’s 36-episode run, wrote the Hindustan Times, shifted the topic of dinner conversations throughout the vast country from cricket to business plans. Terms like “gross profit” and “TAM” (total addressable market) have entered common parlance among its 1.4bn people.Shows with star judges awarding talent (and panning its absence) have long had a place on Indian television. But they have historically involved song and dance, not spreadsheets. Sony Entertainment received 85,000 applications for “Shark Tank”. These were whittled down to 198 pitches presented to juries of five judges, themselves chosen to reflect India’s new business elite (rather than being scions of industrial conglomerates they had founded firms peddling everything from cosmetics and drugs to a matchmaking app and electronic payments).The enterprising hopefuls’ televised presentations were heavier on enthusiasm than polish. Rather than being a liability, this resonated with viewers who, as many blogs and social-media posts attested, saw themselves in the contestants. For “Shark Tank” was, in its effervescent diversity, not unlike Indian society. Of the 67 startups that secured some money from the judges, three-fifths were run by first-time entrepreneurs. More than two-fifths had female co-founders and a third were co-founded by someone from a small city rather than a business hub like Bangalore, Delhi or Mumbai. Only nine of the winning businesses had a founder who boasted a degree from the prestigious engineering and business schools that are the traditional pathway into India’s economic aristocracy.Some of the winning pitches seemed humdrum (banana crisps). Others were ingenious (an engineer whose family had been devastated by the abrupt death of their cow developed an electronic ear clip to monitor bovine health). Some were both (a bicycle-mounted pesticide sprayer). Even some losing proposals won recognition. Reversible dresses (good for a day in the office and a night on the town) were dismissed by one of the judges as suitable for a mop; his wife subsequently appeared wearing one on TV.“Shark Tank” may have struck a chord because it came at a time when Indians as a whole were becoming more enterprising. Indian entrepreneurs have registered over 310,000 new businesses in the past two years, up from 250,000 or so in the previous two (see chart). The ranks of retail stockpickers doubled between March 2019 and November 2021, to 77m. Some of this happened out of necessity: the pandemic up-ended lives and led millions to seek new opportunities. But some was probably by choice. The number of candidates sitting India’s exacting civil-service exam appears to have peaked in 2016. Some eggheads who would once have become bureaucrats may have opted to become capitalists instead. ■For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter.This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Shark attack” More