PM Narendra Modi to IT captains: Create world-class companies

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Apple has revenues of $274.5 billion. For Google, the figure is $181.69 billion and for Microsoft the figure is $143.02 billion.

TCS, India’s biggest IT company, has a revenue of $23 billion.

Despite all the chest beating that we do for our IT and tech firms, they are pygmies compared to the global biggies.

On February 17, Prime Minister Narendra Modi egged on the Indian IT industry to dream big, big enough to propel itself into the big global league.

In IT industry as in most other aspects of life size does matter and the prime minister didn’t conceal his impatience.

Addressing the Nasscom Technology and Leadership team, he said, “I have a message for startup founders. Don’t restrict yourself to valuations and exit strategies only. Think how you can create institutions that will outlast this century. Think how you can create world-class products that will set the global benchmark on excellence.”

The emphasis was clear – scale and life of the company.

“Dream big and the nation is with you,” he told the IT industry captains.

Modi’s message was one step forward from what he said just about a week ago when he referred to the industrialists and businessmen as “wealth creators” and underscored their role in creating wealth for society. Taking the hitherto politically unwise step of endorsing investors as role models who should not be maligned at every opportunity, the prime minister said in the Lok Sabha that the culture of the country is changing fast and criticising industrialists won’t even get votes in the new climate.

Modi’s address too revealed a shift in attitude. He urged the startup specialists to step out of their obsession with creating business ventures and building value only to exit it a few years later for making a killing.

He emphasized on creating long term value and laced the advice with his notion of serving the nation in the process.

“This is the right time to set a target and employ full force to achieve them… 27 years from now when we will celebrate 100 years of independence, how many world-class products we had given, how many global leaders we had created and for this we will have to plan and work towards it now itself,” he said.

According to a Nasscom report released earlier this week, even in the pandemic-crippled year of 2020, the country witnessed 1,600 startups, the highest figure in three years. The industry also saw 146 mergers and acquisitions with 90% of these deals were between digitally-focused entities.

It is not often that an online company takes over a brick and mortar operations. But in the second week of January this year, Bengaluru-based online education giant Byju’s signed an agreement to take over brick and mortar Aakash Educational Services that runs a network of more than 200 classroom-based centres where more than 2.5 lakh students take tuitions to gain entry into premier engineering and medical schools.

According to Tracxn, Byjus raised $800 million in 2020, the largest investment secured by a startup that year. Next in line was $700 million raised by PhonePe and $660 secured by Zomato.

In the meeting Modi also mentioned how he has set a target of connecting the 6 lakh villages of the country with optic fibre cable in the next 1,000 days. He told the audience in the virtual meet that they should start thinking on how to utilise this infrastructure to improve the lives of common men with this digital backbone.