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Warburg Pincus Gets 13X Return on Billion Dollar Indian IPO
Warburg Pincus, the largest private equity investor in India, made 13 times its initial investment when India’s largest independent Business Process Outsourcing firm WNS Ltd listed its shares on the New York Stock Exchange on July 26.
Warburg bought a 65% stake in WNS in May 2002 when the then financially-strapped British Airways Plc, sold a part of its founding shares for $40 million. Last week, that stake was worth almost $523 million as the company topped a billion dollars in market value.
Private equity firms have made lucrative returns from early bets on companies propelling the world’s 2nd fastest growing economy. Warburg’s investment in WNS was its second successful Indian investment after Bharti Tele-Ventures, the country’s largest mobile phone operator. It made more than five times its money in October 2005 on an investment of $300 million.
Others venture funds are fast following suit. They invested $3.4 billion in India in the first six months of 2006, a third more than all of last year and more than twice the year before.
India’s 100 Million Mobile Market Boom: Growth to Surpass China in 2006
India became the fifth member of the “100 million mobile club” along with the U.S., China, Russia and Japan when it announced 106 million phone subscribers at the end of June 2006. The fastest growing mobile phone market in the world, by percentage, is expected to grow at a compounded annual rate of 31% over the next five years to 2010, according to research firm Gartner, Inc. That compares with 11% for China, whose 400 million subscribers make it the world’s largest mobile phone market.
India is expected to add 5.5 million monthly new users by the end of this year. That’s more than the entire population of Finland, home of the world’s biggest phone set maker Nokia Oyj, added each month. It will also propel India past China, where 5.25 million new subscribers are added monthly. India has added about 4.5 million subscribers each month this year.
Not surprisingly, in a change from Far East-based manufacturing, Nokia announced last year it will set up a $150 million manufacturing plant in India to cope with demand. Motorola Inc. announced a similar $100 million plant this year. They join their South Korean rivals Samsung Electronics and LG Corp., who already manufacture handsets in India.
Lower Costs
India’s mobile market growth reflects a 93% fall in the cost of calls since 1998 and growing availability of affordable handsets. Phone calls cost 2 cents per minute, the lowest in the world, across any network at any time. Nine out of ten mobile users have signed up in the past three and a half years.
At a lunch attended by IndusView in London earlier this month, India’s Minister for Communications and Information Technology Dayanidhi Maran stated a target of 250 million telephone connections by 2007 and 500 million by 2010. When its mobile and 47 million strong fixed-line populations are combined, India today has a total phone subscriber base of 150 million.
Market Size
Given the current momentum, it’s feasible that India will achieve its target of tripling its phone population in five years. Its mobile phone penetration should hit 32% by 2010, up from 7% in March, according to Gartner. That translates into a phone market alone worth $6 billion in 2010, more than twice $2.4 billion in 2005.
Indo-U.S. Nuclear Deal: Big Business Gets Reactive
India could become a lucrative market for nuclear energy equipment makers if and when the U.S. Congress clears the nuclear deal between the two countries. The CEOs of the world’s top nuclear companies hoping to get a share of this market have already started visiting India’s capital New Delhi.
General Electric Co., the world's second-largest company by market value, Russia's state-owned nuclear company Atomprom and Toshiba Corp., which is buying Westinghouse's nuclear unit from British Nuclear Fuels, are vying to enter India’s nuclear energy market.
New joint ventures are expected as India looks to combine foreign and homegrown expertise. With India planning to build eight civil nuclear energy plants, some of the privately held power producers have indicated their willingness to venture into nuclear energy.
Anne Lauvergeon, chairperson of the executive board of Paris-based Areva, the world's largest manufacturer of nuclear reactors, was in New Delhi recently to announce that it would make India a top priority once the Indo-US nuclear deal is finalized. India and France have already signed an agreement on sharing future technology to develop civilian nuclear energy during the India visit of French President Jacques Chirac in February 2006.
Nuclear Power Contribution
The total size of India’s electric power system is currently 124 Giga Watts. Coal fuel comprises 55%, hydroelectric 26%, natural gas 10% and renewable sources 5%. Nuclear energy makes up only 3% of total installed capacity, according to testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.
Nuclear power has been controlled by the central government, mainly for non-energy military purposes and has not been exposed to commercial accountability. India’s domestic uranium reserves are also limited. India’s Atomic Energy Commission estimates that domestic resources could support only 10 GW of installed nuclear capacity. Not surprisingly, nuclear energy has played only a small role in the power sector.
Whether and how that could change is what’s at stake in the US-India nuclear deal. It will provide “full” civil nuclear cooperation between the U.S. and India. By enabling India to import modern nuclear energy technology, as well as uranium, a properly regulated deal would in effect alleviate the historical restrictions placed on civilian Indian nuclear power.
CO2 Savings
The CO2 savings implications of replacing coal with a range of installed nuclear capacities are considerable. New nuclear capacity could be in the range of 10 GW to 20 GW by 2020. The State Department has proposed that 20 GW of new nuclear capacity could be built by 2020. This represents a middle-of-the-road estimate provided by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in her April 5th remarks to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Under this scenario, by displacing 20GW of capacity that would otherwise be coal-fired, the new nuclear capacity would save 145 million tons of CO2 per year. The Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has recently suggested that the India nuclear deal could have even larger implications, arguing that it might lead India to install up to 40GW of new nuclear capacity by 2015.
U.K.- India Trade Gets U.K. Government’s Visible Hand
Your job gets easier when the government supports you. That’s the mantra behind the U.K. Government’s new five-year strategy announced by the UK Trade & Investment (UKTI), which aims to boost U.K. trade and investment with India and China. UKTI is the U.K. government organization that provides support services for U.K. companies engaged in overseas trade, and foreign businesses focused on the U.K. as a business destination.
UKTI will market the U.K. overseas as a key business partner and as the preferred location for inward investment, promote the City of London as the world's leading international financial centre and lobby overseas on regulatory issues and barriers to trade and investment. India’s trade and investment relations with the U.K. are already rising, as India became the third largest overseas investor in the U.K. during 2005-06.
Europe has found new favor among Indian companies as a common market emerges in Europe and outsourcing to India becomes an acceptable business practice. European companies, for their part, are getting increasingly aware of the booming domestic market in the world’s second fastest growing economy.
If UKTI acts as a catalyst, it will help U.K. businesses in India emulate the success of European firms such as Nokia and Areva. |
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